GOsC launches Patient Involvement Forum

We want to work in partnership with patients to help make sure we put their safety, wellbeing and views at the heart of everything we do. We also want to ensure we do everything we can to maximise the opportunities that patients have to share their views with us and with the profession.

Therefore we are looking for osteopathic patients to join our newly launched Patient Involvement Forum, where patients will get the opportunity to take part in any of a range of activities such as focus groups, surveys, working groups and consultations.

We can provide training and support for patients, where necessary, to help them participate fully in this work and enhance their own skills, which might be useful in other contexts and other parts of their life or work.

To minimise any financial barriers that may prevent participation and to encourage as wide a range of participants as possible, we will often offer a participation fee as a thank you for the time, skills and expertise patients contribute and reasonable expenses will be provided where appropriate.

Our aim is to listen to and learn from osteopathic patients to better understand their perspective. We’d like to use that insight to inform osteopathic education and standards, and to improve our patient information and guidance for osteopaths so that it meets these needs. We plan to share our learnings from patients to give osteopaths the opportunity to hear about different perspectives and to gain new insights.

Working in partnership with patients is a major priority for the GOsC. It forms part of our wider Communications and Engagement Strategy, which sees the GOsC working to improve engagement with all our stakeholders.

If you are an osteopathic patient, or an osteopath who has any patients who you think would be interested and willing to use their unique experience to help make a difference to future osteopathic care, you can find out more by visiting our Patient Involvement Forum page.