Ruth Wilson

While working for Teva, I worked with a group of 18 international patient organizations to explore what ‘unites them’ beneath the therapy area they represent. The idea for this work was stimulated by a conversation I had with my 6-year-old daughter who was starting to learn about health at school. We were talking about the fact that doctors treated different parts of the body – i.e. if you had a sore throat, then you saw an ENT doctor; if you broke a bone, you saw an orthopaedic doctor and so on. She thought about this for a while and then asked ‘but who looks after me?’, clearly not identifying herself as a collection of body parts!

Collaboratively, we developed an ‘issue-focused framework’ which allows groups to collectively unite and drive common agendas to re-shape health policy.

During THNK, I founded The Wilson Lab & #PersonBeforePatient to tell the story of health and explore how individuals come together to collectively improve societal health and to instigate a  sustainable health care system which has been designed for people.