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The next five years – THIS strategy to 2027

Five years on from our initial funding award from the Health Foundation, we are delighted with the progress we’ve made. Meeting the need for a centre of excellence dedicated to generating evidence to support improvement in quality and safety of healthcare, THIS Institute is now a distinctive asset for the UK’s health and research ecosystem.

We’ve come a long way in making enduring and important contributions to understanding how to get better at getting better. In a short space of time, we’ve formed over 50 collaborations, completed over 20 projects, funded 45 fellows at 20 UK universities, and published over 250 publications. And we’ve started to change the conversation about the need for evidence to support improvement.

Our success is founded in our highly collaborative, participatory approach and co-design principles. We work directly with people at every level in the health and care system and enable evidence to be turned into action.

But – we have further to go. The next five years will see us advance our mission and vision. Our newly published strategy explains how we will build on our achievements while embracing new thinking and implementing fresh ideas. It sets out our vision, values and plans to take our mission forward.

Our commitment is to innovative, participatory research to build a credible and actionable evidence base. It will be no surprise that the emphasis on co-creating evidence with NHS patients, staff, and wider stakeholders remains at the heart of everything we do. We’ll continue to be trustworthy and unique source of insights into how to improve care, and we’ll take on a growing role in leading and influencing.

Our thriving research fellowship programme, which makes awards to individuals at universities across the UK, will further build capacity over the coming years. Thiscovery, our unique digital platform, will increasingly deliver capability to improve and innovate in healthcare through online collaboration. It will do this by engaging large and diverse groups of people from across the UK in co-design, consultation, research and evaluation efforts, while also acting as an engine for innovation in how to do this kind of work online. And we’ll be creating new Thiscovery-based communities that will mobilise the ingenuity, expertise and lived experience of patients and staff to produce evidence for improvement at scale and speed.

Our partnership with the Health Foundation is crucial to our achievements. We are exceptionally fortunate to benefit from their support, networks and expertise, and we greatly value their commitment and enthusiasm for the institute’s mission.

There’s a way to go. But we’re confident that our commitment, energy, rigour, and creativity will help to get us there.

 

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