Our partner, Talking Health Social Enterprise Network Limited, is about ‘ENGAGING by DESIGN’  and our work on improving communications between health care professionals and patients.  A director of one of our largest health groups wrote, “I do not doubt that your work will help change thousands of lives for the better”!  

The work undertaken by Talking Health (both the SEN and the CIC) is founded, in large part, upon academic research projects (MA and PhD; see below). Our approach is designed to help improve health information understanding to facilitate the information needs of three groups in the context of modern health care and ‘communications’ in a sustainable mode to benefit: (i) Health care Professionals and (ii) the community, families and individuals including ethnic minority people who do not speak the language of the country; and (iii) those in government, education charities and business whose task it is to serve the nation across this area.

Within Talking Health we also enjoy engaging with Euronet and GBOPs; Euronet is a facility to help academics and professionals come together across Europe (and more widely), whilst GBOPs is an enabling facility to help these professionals collaborate by offering an infrastructure designed to facilitate the development of a modern, devolved ‘production line’ (i.e. folks working together) for research and the application of a wide range of ‘professional services’.

For too long over recent decades ‘istening exercises’ have, in practice, taken the form of one group of people – often from government or business in some guise – using (or ab-using) their positions in talking over other groups whom they wanted to persuade to do things differently. Often, it mattered not whether the proposed changes were intended for profit, politics or other reasons.

Talking Health is the antithesis of this: time and again, health care professionals and patients told our researchers that they wanted to be better able to engage directly. Moreover, if they could do so, the relationship would work better for both the parties engaged and everyone else. In turn, outcomes and ‘adherence’ would also be sustainably better. As it happens, both academics and professionals accessing and delivering health care told us the same thing.

That is why the Talking Health project – both the social enterprise network and our community interest entities – were established to help people better help themselves in these areas and across their own wider community. With us, it is very much the case (slightly paraphrased!): “We give you the tools, and you will finish the job”