Ahead of our webinar with the NHS Innovation Accelerator, we break down some of the most effective ways for innovators in health and care to start prioritising listening when looking to improve product development and health system adoption and scaling.
Listening matters. It's the key to successfully reaching key milestones in an innovation’s life cycle. But listening also underpins its long-term prospects as a solution that evolves and continues to meet user needs.
By listening to the views and perspectives of patients, staff and the public, you are choosing to base decisions and your organisation’s pitch on actual evidence, not presumptions. And more explicitly, you are empowering those behind your innovation to:
So, where should you start? Let’s delve into our 5 easy-to-implement ways of doing listening better, so your innovation can reap the rewards.
Engaging with staff, patients and their support networks from the outset, ideally at the concept stage, gives you the raw material that shapes the foundations of your solution.
A product is a story. In a satisfying story, the ending feels inevitable because the early chapters quietly set everything in motion. Innovation works the same way. If you are not listening at the beginning, you cannot expect things to fall into place later on.
Listening early creates the clues your final outcome depends on. It gives you solid ground to build on and protects you from costly plot twists that tend to appear only when unheard voices finally surface.
This is why it is essential to involve the full cast of people affected by a health and care issue, including those who are often overlooked or harder to reach. You need the whole narrative, not just the most prominent characters. When a relevant and diverse range of experiences informs the early design, the finished product feels coherent and well founded.
Ultimately, listening early and widely allows you to plan with confidence, shape prototypes that stand up to scrutiny. Without doing this you will be making decisions rooted in assumption rather than evidence.
Relying on a single way of listening will only ever give you part of the picture. Using a blend of methods broadens the perspectives you hear and increases the number of people who feel able to take part.
In-depth interviews and workshops can spark thoughtful, generous conversations. Being in a room together helps people reflect, respond and build on each other’s ideas. But these formats ask for time, travel and availability, which not everyone can give. Work patterns, caring responsibilities, health, transport and confidence all shape whether someone can attend in-person sessions. Even with excellent facilitation, some people simply find it easier to express themselves in other ways.
This is where simple online methods help widen the net. Quick surveys, short polls or a well-run online community let people participate in their own time and on their own terms. These approaches lower practical barriers and make space for people who might not be able to join a scheduled session but still have experiences that matter.
Using traditional and digital methods together gives you a fuller, more balanced view. It brings depth and breadth into the same frame and helps ensure that listening is as inclusive and accessible as possible.
Listening works best when it functions like a compass. It should help you understand where you are, where you are heading and whether you are drifting off course. To do that, you need to be clear about what you are trying to navigate. Define the decisions you need to make and the gaps in your understanding, and shape your questions around these points. When you know what you are looking for, people’s contributions become signposts rather than scattered impressions.
A compass is only useful if you check it regularly. Returning to your core questions at key stages lets you see what has changed, what remains steady and where your assumptions might no longer hold. This habit builds an evidence base you can trust and gives you confidence when explaining your decisions to colleagues, funders or regulators.
When you share what you have learned, keep the journey in view. Draw out the themes that matter to stakeholders and show plainly how these insights have guided your direction, whether through design changes, funding decisions or adjustments to rollout plans. This demonstrates that listening is not background noise but the instrument that keeps the whole project on course.
Closing the loop is essential to making people feel valued and that their voices have led to change. By neglecting this touchpoint you’re unconsciously making those you’ve engaged with feel like they’ve wasted their time. That their contributions have disappeared into a void like so many surveys we’ve all filled out over the years.
But it’s not just about disclosing the outputs of their input. It’s about continuous engagement over the duration of your product or service’s life, allowing listening to continue to evolve a product’s development, how it is adopted, and how it scales across the healthcare system. You can do this by creating ongoing roles, such as advisory groups, testers, or ambassadors for your brand and innovation.
You cannot listen well if the people you need are too busy to engage. Clinicians, operational teams, commissioners and patients are already stretched, so design your approach around their realities.
Keep surveys short, clear and worth completing. If you need conversations, go to where people already are rather than asking them to travel. Use existing meetings, handover points or community spaces. Fit the format to the workflow, not the other way round.
Reduce the burden and you hear from the people whose decisions determine whether your innovation takes hold.
Watch our webinar with the NHS Innovation Accelerator to hear from our specialist panel:
Access the full recording here to catch up or share with your colleagues who might be interested.
