Written by: Marian Hurmuz

Involving your end-users is getting more and more important in research. Also in the field of health research there is a need for a human centered focus. You can incorporate this by integrating social sciences and humanities (SSH) in your research! At RRD, our research focuses on the end-users. In this news article, I will tell why it is important to involve end-users and give an example of what we do to improve our relationships with our end-users.

 

Engagement of stakeholders

Through continuous engagement with end-users and other important stakeholders, we can learn a lot from their experiences regarding the topic we are studying. It is important to involve these stakeholders as soon as possible in your research. By engaging with them, you are able to take into account their actual needs and wishes and the processes in which the health technology will be used. It is very unpleasant to develop a great solution, which does not fit those needs or processes. Besides, the unpleasant feeling, it is of course also a waste of scarce resources.

The knowledge you gather in the early stage of your research, helps you to identify how to incorporate the health technology in the best way possible into the daily lives of the end-users and healthcare organisations. It is important to test and evaluate this with end-users to see whether you translated their needs correctly or changes are needed. This will help you to come to sustainable implementation of your health technology.

 

Giving something back to your stakeholders

Feedback is of course not a one-way pathway. When you want to build a relationship with your end-users or other stakeholders, you need to frequently interact with them. It is important that they do not forget about you and your research. Furthermore, they also need to feel that they are valuable to you. One of things we do at RRD to give them this feeling, is to share our early results of the studies with them. We noticed that they really appreciated this! It also led to some unprompted feedback if something is lacking in the results or interpreted wrongly.

When you share your findings with your stakeholders, you do not only ask for information from them, but you also give something back to them! This can encourage stakeholders to be actively involved in your research and more willing to help you out during your research.

For example, within the RE-SAMPLE project (Horizon grant no 965315), we have created feedback videos sharing our initial findings. As an example you will find one of these videos below.

Would you like to see this video in Dutch? Click on the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZQ9FWMFVSw