This month, we had the opportunity to participate in a roundtable hosted by Pfizer. This session focused on shaping a new framework for how the company works with patient organisations. The aim was to ensure that patients have a meaningful voice throughout every stage of their work, and that Pfizer is building trust and working collaboratively to empower smaller organisations like ours. 

During the session, we emphasised the need for genuine co-production with patients. To us, this means involving people with lived-experience not as a formality, but as equal partners in the decision-making process from the very beginning. We think that co-production must be embedded, sustained, and responsive, not a tokenistic gesture or ‘one-off’. And, crucially, the insights patient communities provide must be meaningfully acted upon. In our own experience, patients are the experts, and our voices should be recognised as just that: expertise.

We also raised a critical point about trust, especially when working with marginalised groups. LGBTIQ+ people are facing an increasingly hostile political climate, adding to the barriers we already face in healthcare. That makes it more important than ever for larger organisations in the healthcare space to stand with and actively empower patient advocacy groups like us, so that we can continue to provide the support our community so desperately needs. This is how to effectively build credibility and trust with patient organisations in the long-term: doing what is right for the patients we aim to serve, even when it isn’t easy.

Other participants at the roundtable echoed these points, and also raised the importance of ongoing communication with patient organisations. This would help to sustain trust, and ensure that community groups were not caught off-guard if there were sudden changes to the availability of a drug or treatment we rely on.

We also shared our recent collaboration with Pfizer,our Hear Me Out campaign. The campaign encourages healthcare professionals to look beyond a patient’s cancer diagnosis and see the whole person in front of them, including their LGBTIQ+ identity. 

This project is a powerful example of what can happen when industry partners meaningfully support community-led initiatives. Our campaign was co-produced with LGBTIQ+ people living with and beyond cancer from the outset, so that the content was truly representative of our community and service users. We hope that Pfizer’s new partnership framework can help to support more projects like this, and that patients’ voices are always put front and centre. 

We are grateful to Pfizer for including in this roundtable, for their collaboration on the Hear Me Out campaign, and for giving us the opportunity to share the voices and insights from our service users.

If you’re interested in collaborating with us on co-producing resources, or would like a training session on co-production with the LGBTIQ+ community, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with our Education and Policy Manager, Lee@outpatients.org.uk.