Skip to main content

You are here: School of Healthcare > Enterprise > CPD4Health > PLI

Patient Led Innovation (PLI)

Summary    The PLI philosophy   The PLI partnership   Projects   Reports 

Summary

PLI involves innovating existing products and services to meet the needs of patients and carers, by engaging with patients throughout an innovation-led design process. The benefits are that PLI:

  • places the patient first, which gives them a strong voice amongst stakeholder groups 
  • responds to a clear need or concern identified by patients and users 
  • increases long term health and wellbeing benefits for patients and carers
  • speeds up the innovation process by involving patients and carers at the very beginning and throughout, whilst managing the associated risks 
  • improves the quality of the product or service as it is being continually tested and validated by patients and carers throughout identifies profit-making products and a strong business case for industry and third sector partners
  • creates regular interaction between patients and industry designers and engineers, and healthcare professionals, which increases ownership and adoption of the product or service
  • creates an equal power balance and partnership between the patients and those that are helping to innovate a product or service
  • encourages adoption and diffusion of these innovations throughout the stakeholder groups, particularly within the NHS
  • increases trust and respect between the different stakeholder groups 
  • establishes mutually beneficial partnership working between the public and private sector 
  • avoids products that are not fit for purpose, acceptable to or needed by patients, or not developed with industry, healthcare professionals and patients.

Back to top

The PLI philosophy

PLI has its roots in an established programme of patient led teaching with medical students at the University of Leeds, called Patient Voice. The success of this initiative in regards to the value for patients and the impact it has had for medical students subsequently inspired the programme of Patient led Innovation work with industry and the NHS. It is grounded in the following principles:

  • The patient should benefit first – a moral imperative that drives our philosophical approach to working with patients and ensures that our activity is designed to be done with and for the patient and not to them.
  • Mutual respect is a key principle that drives our work through both what we say and what we do and underpins the quality of the relationship that we have with the patients that we work with.
  • We broker and manage the relationship between patients and industry and the NHS
  • Multi-sector partnership working that facilitates a richer level of understanding of the real value that comes from understanding, respecting and responding to different perspectives.

We invest in the patients and carers you would work with as you would invest in your staff. Specifically we take them through Learning Journeys and support their on-going development and involvement through the Patient Community.

Patient Learning Journey – what is it?

  • A development programme for patients that ensures that we achieve our first principle that ‘the patient should benefit first’
  • Investment of time and resources to enable patients to understand, use and share their expertise in a way that is easy for other partners to understand and make use of to improve their product development and service provision.

  • Structured approach that provides development opportunities

Patient Community – what is it?

  • A managed community that can be accessed by industry, the NHS and H.E. for specific projects
  • A growing community made up of individuals who have been through a patient learning journey
  • A supported infrastructure that grows the community through:
    • A programme of development opportunities for patients
    • A supportive network for patients
    • Mentoring
    • Enableing patients to engage at a level that meets their needs

Back to top

The PLI partnership

We aim to fast-track innovation to improve people's health and social wellbeing and we do this by starting with the qualitative experience of patients and how innovation in product or service delivery can make a difference to their lives. We take patients and carers through a learning journey exercise, and channel the energies of patients, engineers, designer and other industry bodies into product development. Our starting point is the patient and their everyday experience of living with a condition, living with carers, their experience of home and community care, and how they interact with their immediate environments.

Our activities include:

Brokering partnerships between patients and patient groups, designers, the NHS and other public and private healthcare bodies, industry and non-profit organisations. The focus of these partnerships is to influence the design and development of medical products, health aids and service delivery, which will add comfort to everyday activities, decrease pain, decrease implementation time and use shorter and less invasive procedures.

Expert consultancy through our experience of working with patients and carers we can work with organisations and individual teams to support them in translating their strategic intentions regarding PPI and customer insight into an operational reality in the following ways:

  • Expertise in establishing genuine patient and public involvement
  • Understanding of the pitfalls of PPI and how to avoid them
  • Be-spoke staff development days to prepare an organisation for high quality PPI
  • Research knowledge that is being developed in regards to the process and impact of patient led innovation

Back to top

Projects 

 Back to top

reports

1-page report on PLI       3-page report on PLI    full report on PLI

 Back to top