Linking Up the Silos

We have been in operation for years and have not made much of an effort to communicate. So, what is the point of us wanting to communicate now? Why are we doing this? The simple and honest answer is that we want to get into the habit of more regular engagement.

One reason is that we work across different sectors where people are otherwise working in silos. We have noticed that there is never much cross-over of expertise or know-how across the sectors we work in: people working in one sector don’t tend to ever have much to do with people in other sectors. This even happens within the same company: clinical phase team don’t tend to have much to do with regulatory submission or pharmacovigilance and vice versa. I have always been surprised that more intellectual cross-over does not happen. I think it is a great shame because each sector is mutually complimentary, certainly from a methods point of view: cognitive debriefing could learn something from health literacy testing, and this could learn something from human-factor testing, which could learn something from comprehension testing and vice versa and so on. After all, these are just differing methods of eliciting insights from patients – the patient voice.

Over the years we have developed a kind of peripheral vision to recognise what I describe as the ‘invisible glue’ that connects each of these seemingly distinct and disconnected silos. It is this ‘space between’ that interests us: the unseen commonality, the connections that spread organically, this scope for cross-pollination to add to and strengthen Patient Voice research methods.

Therefore, we communicate because we want to link up the silos.