Impact Activities

Within the MECFS Lines Consortium, Pluut & Partners serves in the formal role of impact managers. This title reflects a clear ambition: to ensure that the knowledge, insights, and results from the research do not remain unused, but instead make their way into the world, reaching healthcare professionals, policymakers, patient organizations, and other stakeholders.

As impact managers, we think strategically about communication and the application of knowledge. We ask questions such as:

What message do we want to convey? Who do we need to reach? And through which channels, at what moment?

Our approach is based on the principles of action research, a method in which learning, researching, and changing continuously go hand in hand. Instead of only evaluating afterward, we work in the here and now, together with stakeholders, to strengthen the impact of the consortium.

Action research means that we do not just think about change, but actively participate in it. We bring together practical experiences, stakeholder perspectives, and research insights, and use these directly to refine our approach. We work with so called impact cycles: short, iterative processes that aim for concrete, visible results that increase the impact of the consortium.

Each cycle focuses on a specific goal or challenge. One example is the cycle aimed at increasing the visibility of the consortium. One of the actions in this cycle was the creation of a soundboard group consisting of physicians, policymakers, researchers, educators, and (representatives of) patients. Throughout the duration of the consortium, this group actively contributes ideas on questions arising within the consortium and on how we can effectively disseminate and apply our results.

By working in this way, we ensure that we remain flexible and responsive to what is happening within and around the consortium, and that we continuously learn and improve.