PPIE to inform organisational strategy

How should a health regulator decide which treatments to fund when need outstrips budget? How should a local health system choose where to focus its efforts on obesity? These are decisions that benefit from public and patient input but are often too complex for a survey or a focus group. They need deliberation: time for people to learn, weigh trade-offs and form considered views.

We have run multiple NICE Listens public dialogues for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, covering disease severity weighting, environmental sustainability, and health inequalities in NICE guidance. Each dialogue brought together around 25 to 30 members of the public across several reconvened workshops, with expert input, stimulus materials designed with a NICE steering group, and iterative design that responded to what participants wanted to explore next. The outputs have directly informed NICE's thinking on how it accounts for severity, sustainability and inequalities in its methods.

For Imperial College Health Partners, we have ran workshops with residents from the eight North West London boroughs to help shape ICHP's mission on obesity. Residents with lived experience of obesity and related conditions considered possible focus areas, from prevention for families to weight management services to GLP-1 medicines. The evidence from this work is shaping the direction of the mission as it moves into delivery.

Deliberation works when participants are trusted with complexity and given the time to engage with it properly. Our dialogues are designed around that principle, and the result is public input that can stand up to scrutiny and actually move organisational decision-making forward.