In the summer of 2022 as I worked for Kings Collage London and St Thomas and Guy’s hospital helping found a think tank for women and children’s health for my Leadership in Action Project. This was a 6-week endeavour where every week my fellow scholar Jasmine and I researched and planned a different element of setting up a think tank. Each part of this will be explained below.

The first week was essentially an introduction into think tanks and how to set one up, with particular focus on health and health policy. Our supervisors outlined their goals for the future, and what they wanted us to work on in the coming weeks. They explained how they were trying to bridge the gap between patients and their doctors first-hand experience of health in South-East London, and how to translate that into fair and informed health policy at a council and later government level. With that knowledge, they outlined what they wanted us to produce each week to help enable the founding of such an organisation. That week, we researched existing health think tanks around the world, feeding back what made them successful and what their limitations were. We also read the relevant literature on how to start a think tank, creating a presentation with all this information that we presented to the board.

We also decided that it would be worth emailing existing health think tanks in the UK and asked to interview them for our project. Many got back to us and across the 6 weeks we spoke to 5 think tanks, asking them about their funding model, their stakeholders, their inception and their future goals. 

Next, we were asked to outline a potential funding model. This was perhaps the most crucial and so far, difficult issue with setting up the organisation, as the service we would provide couldn’t be one we charged for (policy recommendations, academic papers, representing and translating local interest to leaders). Most think tanks had endowments that kept them going, however we researched and recommended a list of around 20 grants that we could apply for to keep us running for the foreseeable future. We also recommended a potential consulting service that we could charge for. All this was fed back and well received by our supervisors. 

We proceeded to map stakeholders involved in the organisation, and the media by which they communicated. We built a stakeholder map that demonstrated this from doctors, patients, grant providers, researchers, local government, and council etc. We focused on the importance of social media and awareness when it came to local people, academic papers and research in the scientific community, and reports and headlines with leaders, and how these all overlapped within stakeholders. We also categorised them in terms of importance.

Then, we researched what type of organisation we should register as, and whether a charity would be the best despite its inability to make profit, this was the most difficult part as it required legal and business knowledge that we did not have.

We then read papers on knowledge translation, a fundamental function of a think tank, and how to be successful at it. This means how to best take knowledge from academia and present it to the public and to leaders. We produced summaries of these papers for our supervisors, and outlined which techniques we thought were most applicable to our aim. We also interviewed doctors and economists in KCL to ask for their recommendations.

On the last week we produced one long document with all our recommendations. This summarised and refined all the work we did in the previous weeks and compiled it coming to judgements about how to best set up this health think tank. 

This experience was a huge learning curve.  None of these activities were ones we had tried before, however it taught us a lot about how to research properly, and how to plan something on a large scale. It was great to see to see the level of intelligence and extreme competence of some of the doctors we spoke to, it was personally inspiring to me, one day hoping to be that good at what I do.

The specific impact of my work on the project is yet to be fully seen as King's Health Partners are still in the process of setting the think tank up as it is a very long process. However, once done so, I hope they use some of the ideas that Jasmine and I came up with such as which grants to apply for, and the use of the academic literature we found to translate knowledge. This will make the think tank have a more successful funding model and output efficiency.