Our partnership principles
Our Future Health works with a broad range of partners, to help us deliver our mission of helping people live longer, healthier lives. This page sets out the principles by which we partner with individuals, groups and organisations across the academic, not-for-profit, community, public, and private sectors.
Our partners are pivotal in helping us to create and deliver our programme. They bring new ways of working, access to networks and communities, and a wealth of expertise in discovering and developing new methods of prevention, early detection and treatment of health conditions and diseases. Our partners work with us to help raise awareness and expand the reach of our programme within the communities they support.
Partners may also provide critical financial support and other in-kind contributions, enabling the programme to operate long term and ensuring that benefits to both participants and researchers can be fully realised.
Our Future Health is a world-leading resource for health research. By working together with like-minded organisations and making Our Future Health resources available to researchers both from academia and industry via our access process, we aim to help accelerate the discovery and development of innovative diagnostics and treatments and help people live longer, healthier lives.
Our Future Health’s partnership principles
All partnerships must support and align with our charitable objectives and be for the public benefit. They must comply with all relevant laws and regulations as well as best practice, including complying with research ethics and clinical regulation. They must also reflect and maintain the boundaries of participant consent.
We conduct due diligence on partners. Each is individually assessed.
We have six partnership principles. They are:
1. Enhance public benefit and trust
Our partnerships should benefit the public and our participants by supporting our values and the delivery of our goals as set out in our charitable objects.
Partnerships will be assessed for alignment with our overarching objectives and organisational values with due consideration of how any partnership may impact on public trust, the reputation and success of the programme. As a charity we will only undertake activities that deliver our mission and provide public benefit.
2. Fair and equitable
Our partnerships should aim to be inclusive in nature, with a clearly defined potential to benefit the whole programme where possible. No partnership should be entered into that would disadvantage any specific volunteer or participant community.
Partnerships will be assessed on merit for their overall impact, with the potential to create inequity a major consideration. We may look to prioritise partnerships with the potential to positively impact those who tend to be underrepresented in health research.
3. Openness and honesty
We will be open and transparent about our partnerships and in our interaction with our partners.
We acknowledge the importance of maintaining independence and will not compromise our ethics or integrity as part of a partnership. We will be clear about the benefits to both Our Future Health and the partner in any partnership agreement. We will publish on our website a full list of our partners, the type of partnership and our reasons for partnering.
4. Accountability
We will embed the principles of accountability within our partnerships.
This will be managed through our Governance structures and in accordance with our policy framework. Overall responsibility will reside with the Our Future Health Board of Trustees, which will be reviewed over time as our partnerships expand to new sectors.
All partnerships will be governed by written agreements, which will detail requirements and expectations from each party and capture agreed contractual arrangements. We will work with a broad range of partners across different sectors and through a variety of partnership structures, ensuring that no single partner has undue influence over the Our Future Health programme.
5. Building and maintaining credibility
Our partnerships should look to create positive impact which ideally can be sustained.
We will monitor this through our feedback channels (e.g. social media, helpdesk) and measuring brand awareness and recruitment achieved via partnerships. We will look to prioritise partnerships which have the potential for sustained positive impact.
6. Financial sustainability
Financial support is critical to our ongoing success in order for the programme to operate in the long term, so that benefits to both participants and researchers can be fully realised.