DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION


To create a trusted community linked to research, each stakeholder group’s values need to be recognised and evaluated in relation to each other


How to achieve the mutual investment - values being recognised by consensus Live experience experts can rarely bring enough financial strength to the table to see a treatment all the way from inception to licensing and use in healthcare systems. Neither can healthcare support and delivery experts, but they can help with understanding how a product may actually work in a real world health system. Treatment discovery, development and tracking experts rarely have real world experience linked to the work they are doing. So in simple terms each stakeholder has a value that the others don’t. Without each stakeholder, the potential for new research discoveries and outcomes are extremely limited and unlikely. To create a trusted community linked to


research, each stakeholder group’s values need to be recognised and evaluated in relation to each other. This doesn’t mean that their inputs have to be equal, that will never be achievable. Whatever each of the stakeholders can put into the research process must be seen as of equitable value, making each stakeholder feel like their input is of equal importance. All stakeholders need to agree on the currency and exchange rate of values. As an example, time is something we all


50 | Outsourcing in Clinical Trials Handbook


hold in a value state. Whatever time one of the stakeholders can put into a project it holds its value. For a patient organisation, due to the number of its personnel, the time they can put into a project may be limited to 5 hours a week, whereas a tech company who is driving forward a new product may have many staff members and can give 30 hours a week. This doesn’t make the 5 hours any less valued than the 30 hours. Both stakeholders have recognised that due to their circumstances, their input is equitable as the focus of their activities is still the same - a new product that will be available to improve the wellbeing of people with the condition they are both invested in. This then creates a trust community that others can see and understand. It removes the small naive child from the piggy in the middle and recognises them as an equitable partner in the game.


How to implement the idea into cultural change The first step is to establish a values system that is relevant to your organisation or project and make sure it can be adopted by all stakeholders i.e comparable inputs such as time, expertise, finances etc. This will avoid tokenism and putting one person at the centre, bringing a shared language to the activities that everyone can buy in to. When you’ve used that value system once, you can see how easy it is to map it to the rest of your organisational activities and therefore start to change the culture. On top of this, the things you will learn from


each research project that follow those values will start to produce mappable universal truths that can easily be measured and shared. Beyond the metric of a treatment item being brought to market, the learnings of where value inputs have been made by the different stakeholders can then be evaluated to justify more investment in those activities in the future. When outcomes are transparent and recognition of value is an explicit activity, then trust communities can be created and sustained. In conclusion, if we take these steps, the


future of research as a truly inclusive system and equitable representation of all stakeholders can be achieved.


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