What we do

Open Source Policy was founded to help people achieve change.

Our experience has been that patients and clinicians often have great ideas for improvements - changes that could save staff time, save the NHS money, and improve patient outcomes.

Yet the health and social care ecosystem is big, and often quite confusing. It's a system permanently in motion, and every part of it links with every other part.

When you have a good idea, you want to share it straight away, yet somehow as a private individual it's more difficult than that. Trying to go from idea to implementation requires a lot of energy, time, and luck - and is often impossible for the average person to achieve alone. But we shouldn't be relying on chance.

Open Source Policy serves society by providing a facilitated conversation between patients, clinicians, and policymakers.

These groups have different needs, are under different pressures, and to a large extent speak (in effect) different languages as a result. Open Source Policy translates between these groups to create evidence-backed policy recommendations that protect patients, save staff time, and save the NHS money.

Many people have deep knowledge of the healthcare systems they, or their friends and family, have experienced. Yet we hear from many people who don't feel heard by the NHS, particularly if they have had negative experiences of medical care, and especially if they are from marginalised communities (including people of colour, people with disabilities, people from the LGBTQIA+ community, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds).

Patients tell us they often feel their voice will not make a difference to the healthcare system, yet when they begin to speak with us, it usually becomes abundantly clear that if there was a realistic way to do this, they would like to use their personal experiences to help improve the situation for future patients.

One patient, who preferred to remain anonymous, said:

"If my bad experience was used to protect other people and make things better, it would make all the needless pain I went through in hospital worth something at least."

We believe everyone should have a voice, and we work to amplify patients' voices, especially those from marginalised and minority groups, who are often the least heard in society.

Health and social care professionals, from doctors to social workers to commissioners, also don't have a straightforward way to make changes to the healthcare system - particularly not at the systemic level. Even if their manager is receptive to making a specific change, there's no formal or simple mechanism to allow hospitals and care providers across the UK to implement best practice lessons learnt. This leaves every hospital (re)inventing the wheel for themselves and allows for wide variations in practice.

We have also heard from many professionals who are becoming jaded to the systemic problems they face in their working lives, because they feel powerless to change the system, and some who are burning out of their profession - a calling they chose expressly to help other people and make a difference to people's lives - as a direct consequence.

Meanwhile, policymakers face budgetary pressures and are constantly searching for ways to make more efficient policy, yet don't necessarily have the personal experience of specialised aspects of the NHS to see what changes would improve the situation (yet these changes are often obvious to people at the coalface).

The Civil Service and the NHS make efforts to understand diverse perspectives, yet more work remains to be done in this direction, particularly as policymakers, clinicians, and patients rarely interact without power dynamics at play, influencing what is heard and by whom. We believe this is a core reason why healthcare scandals such as Mid Staffs occur.

Research has shown there are 11,000 needless deaths in NHS care each year. Despite public inquiries, healthcare scandals continue to occur, and so do avoidable deaths.

This is not to point the finger at the NHS, which is staffed by many thousands of people each doing their level best to deliver excellent care, usually under great pressure.

It is simply to illustrate: We need a better way, for everyone's sake.

Open Source Policy aims to fill this need by brokering a structured dialogue between patients, clinicians and policymakers. We talk with patients and clinicians to explore what changes could be made, why, and what benefits this could bring.

When the idea is ready, we develop pilots in collaboration with think tanks and academics, to ensure our pilots will provide the requisite data to provide a convincing busines and ethical case for change. Finally, we present our ideas to the relevant health authority, whether that is operational managers, strategic leaders in the NHS, or central health authorities such as the Department of Health and Social Care.

We are different to other organisations in the healthcare ecosystem because we are run by patients, for patients, and with equality, diversity and inclusion at the heart of what we do.

Our leadership team is diverse, which means we are trusted by diverse groups of people, whose voices are often unintentionally excluded from current feedback and engagement mechanisms, so we hear about problems others don't.

This enables us to find unique solutions and better protect marginalised groups, reducing the healthcare inequalities suffered by many in minority communities, while playing our part in reducing structural inequalities within society.

© 2020 Open Source Policy | All rights reserved.
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