In 2021, we created our patient charter, outlining the ways in which we’re committed to supporting patients. This includes making sure that we listen to experts-by-experience and seek their input as we develop innovations in mental health care.
Our new online Mental Health Experiences community is formed of people with personal experience of treatment-resistant depression, and has been set up with this commitment in mind. Rachel Bellamy, Senior Corporate Development Associate at Compass, tells us more.
Tell us about this online community and how it’s set up?
Patients are at the heart of everything we do at Compass. We set up the Mental Health Experiences community to listen to and understand how mental health challenges impact people’s lives every day.
The Mental Health Experiences community is a private, online group of 100 people who all have personal experience of treatment-resistant depression. The community is made up of people from several different countries and a diverse range of backgrounds. CorEvitas, LLC, a company that strives to advance patient care by generating real world insights into health conditions and therapeutics, is running the community on our behalf. The community is hosted on HealthUnlocked, a health-based social media platform. To protect their privacy, community members are not identifiable.
Over the next year, community members will get to know one another and answer questions, surveys, and polls around their experiences of treatment-resistant depression and the treatment journey associated with it. We’ll feed these insights back into our teams that conduct discovery and development work, to make sure that they hear and understand the voices and input of those with lived experience.
Why is understanding people’s lived experiences so vital in developing new innovations?
Listening to people’s lived experiences helps us truly understand the unmet needs of patients and to focus on that unmet need as we design and develop our innovations. We’ve laid out our commitment to listening to experts-by-experience through our patient charter, and we hold ourselves accountable to this as we carry out our work.
What have you learnt from setting up this community?
That experts-by-experience are often very willing to contribute to the development of new treatments but often don’t know how they can, other than through participating in clinical trials. This has reinforced to me the importance of Compass creating these opportunities for patients to contribute their voices and experiences to inform our research and development efforts, and the need to make these opportunities accessible to a diverse range of people.
Listening to people’s lived experiences helps us truly understand the unmet needs of patients and to focus on that unmet need as we design and develop our innovations.