HealthSense is likely going to cease to exist. I got this message yesterday
Dear colleagues,
As was discussed at the AGM we have approached
Consilium Scientific (CS) with a view to folding HealthSense into Consilium.
The primary reason why we need to do this is a critical shortage of volunteers needed to run HealthSense: the organisation has always relied on volunteers and while the enthusiasm remains as strong as ever we are increasingly short of people able to commit enough time to our work.
As of the AGM we no longer have a secretary and our treasurer wishes to step down as soon as possible. Mandy Payne is our newsletter editor but she does many other things for the organisation and is a real, long-term enthusiast for our activities. However, she has decided that continuing to publish the newsletter is not justified in terms of the amount of impact that it has. We have agreed that the Autumn issue just published will be the last HealthSense Newsletter. We have also recently lost the person who has administered our Student Prize competition and the overall co-ordinator of the competition may wish to step aside in the near future as well.
Consilium’s proposals have been circulated and there is a good deal of overlap in our aims. However, CS exists specifically to improve scientific rigour and transparency in clinical research while HealthSense is more broadly concerned with evidence-based healthcare in practice. This different focus – from bench to bedside – means some of our work simply would not fit.
Essentially, CS would subsume HealthSense. It would continue the Caroline Richmond Student Prize competition but would not want to continue with the annual HealthSense Award. If we go ahead with the merger it would mean that Thursday's ceremony with Patricia Murray would be the last. A merger would also mean the end of the name HealthSense unless anyone wants to start a separate organisation.
Consilium is planning to set up a Campaigns and Advocacy function which would take forward
TranspariMed and could easily incorporate voluntary input from current HealthSense members. CS considers that there’s no reason this couldn’t grow to focus on specific issues in which HealthSense members have long been interested: for example, campaigns on clinical trial reporting or on screening might be a good fit. On the other hand, campaigns against quack treatments would not be. (In such a case we would be left individually to work outside CS.)
Some members have worried that CS is not a registered charity and its website is not very forthcoming about where its money comes from – perhaps paradoxical in an organisation devoted to transparency. However, its accounts are publicly available at
Companies House. Leeza Osipenko (who is both a HealthSense stalwart and CS’s CEO) confirms that they do not take money from pharmaceutical companies and only received funding from two patient organisations (MPE and Motor Neuron Diseases). They have small grants from
JustTreatment (and indeed from HealthSense), and big ones from the
NIHR and
Arnold Ventures, a U.S. philanthropic organisation, as well as some modest donations via the Donate button on their website
It would be sad to see HealthSense disappear after more than 30 years of hard work, enthusiasm, several modest successes and one or two real achievements. But it is very hard now to see a practical alternative.
If there is a group of (hitherto silent) volunteers prepared to take over the helm of HealthSense as a broadly-based campaign for evidence-based healthcare treatments please make yourselves known to me at
chair@healthsense-uk.org in the next day or two. Otherwise the officers will propose to the Committee that the Consilium Scientific offer should be accepted.
Best wishes.
Roger Fisken
Chair of HealthSense
chair@healthsense-uk.org
and Caroline Richmond involved......
