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Public Engagement

Engaging with the public is of increasing strategic importance for higher education, to
strengthen relevance, responsiveness and accountability and to build trust. We have always
placed people at the heart of our research and public engagement offers an opportunity to
share our research with the public and allow the public to help shape research agendas.

Public engagement highlights in
2019 include:

(left to right) Marjon van der Pol, Mandy Ryan and
Dwayne Boyers, led a Café Scientifique event at
the Belmont Filmhouse titled ‘What should we value
in healthcare?’. This looked at how the NHS makes
choices about what treatments to fund by weighing
costs against benefits. The discussion focused
on what benefits should be included – clinical,
wellbeing, or something else – and whether the NHS should pay for treatments that don’t improve health but are
still valued by the public.

Zoé Ejebu (right) took part in Soapbox Science Aberdeen,
as part of the May Festival. Soapbox Science is a novel
public outreach platform for promoting women scientists
and the science they do. Zoé talked about alcohol minimum
unit pricing as a policy to help reducing excessive alcohol
consumption and alcohol-related problems in Scotland.
The presentation also provided a brief overview of the
research done in HERU.

Rodolfo Hernández, Alastair Irvine and Patrícia Norwood (Left to right
below), and took part in Cell Block Science at HMP Grampian, Peterhead.
This Wellcome Trust financed initiative is an innovative project bringing
informal science learning into Scottish prisons through researcher visits.
The HERU researchers, along with the HMP Grampian education team, held a
series of workshops where prisoners took part in discussions on how health
economics informs decision making on healthcare financing. The workshops
were very well received as can be seen by the feedback forms the prisoners
were asked to complete at the end of the sessions.

For details of all our public engagement activities see: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/heru/engagement/

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