Funding organizations can do a better job of facilitating communication between stakeholders says David

Transcript

Yes, facilitate communication between all stakeholders. Make it easy, be ready, organize contact activities, things for us to get to know each other, and not just… so we can contact and have conversations one-on-one or in small groups. Webinars and you know, workshops are really great, but in a big group this is not where the most interesting discussions happen. I have seen a lot of kind of hierarchies happen. When those workshops are done, when you’re 30 people trying to learn patient engagement, there’s a hierarchy that is being established. It’s the people who have the more equal and the better kind of partnership with their researchers and patients.

When you’re starting your project, to see this is really disappointing and you’re like, we’re not doing patient engagement because we don’t have a partnership, but the partnership is maybe six months down the road. How do you get there? This is where it’s important and you can’t discuss that in a big room setting with 30 people around you and where there’s one guy or one researcher that has a patient engagement or a super great partnership and then the hierarchy is established and whenever you raise your hand and you want to talk about your little committee, people say, “No, it’s not important.” It’s really to avoid those hierarchies between methods and approaches and generate those little settings where you can discuss openly, your experience. I think if they could manage to do something like this, that would be really valuable.

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