Consumer Advisory Group

If you have experience of palliative care, aged care, chronic care and cancer supportive care, your experience and insight is invaluable to our research and improving the quality of life of other people.

Diversity

We want the IMPACCT CAG to be diverse and inclusive. Research shows that some communities are underrepresented in health research. This results in poorer health outcomes for those communities. It is important that these communities have a voice in clinical research so that we can address the issues that are most important to them.

If you are from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander or Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) community, we’d love to hear from you. We would also love to hear from people in diverse locations as we know that access to healthcare for people in regional, rural and remote locations is more limited than for those living in metropolitan areas.     

Experience

We want to hear from you if you would like to work with us to improve healthcare and if you are:

• a patient/and or family members and/or caregiver who has experience with cancer, aged care, palliative care or chronic illness (eg. heart failure, Parkinson's disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, dementia)
• from any Australian geographical location (metropolitan, regional, rural or remote)
• any language or cultural background

Some CAG members come to us having already undertaken some consumer training. But don’t worry if you haven’t as we can help you to access training. It is more important that you have experience as a patient or caregiver and you want to help others.

We will refer you to external training to help you learn skills in consumer advocacy. We also provide internal training that is specific to IMPACCT. You will be required to complete specialist training in relation to health research by undertaking either one of the below free online courses:

• The Cancer Council’s Consumers in Research training [opens external site]
• Cancer Australia’s Developing Consumer Expertise to Participate in Research [opens external site]

Membership is for a two-year period, with the opportunity to renew after two years.

Meetings are twice per year and may be face-to-face or via teleconference. We are in Sydney but we welcome representatives from other states as well as New South Wales. We will cover your travel costs for face-to-face meetings if you don’t live in Sydney. 

As a CAG member, you will be invited to provide feedback on new and ongoing research projects. You will also be invited to workshops and other events where new study ideas, research in progress and up-to-date research are presented.

There may also be opportunities to attend project-specific meetings as they arise. The principal investigator of the project will talk to you about the project’s specific consumer input needs, including participating in meetings and reviewing documents.