Be Counted. Be Heard.
Every medicine in your cupboard was tested on people first.
Almost none of those people were like us.
Counted Health CIC is here to change that. It starts with something our communities never got: a proper explanation, and a real choice.
Three ways to be counted
-
Book a session for your community.
Free, in your venue, in your language.
Book a session -
Help run the sessions.
We train you, support you, and pay you for each session.
Become an ambassador -
Fund the explaining.
For sponsors, researchers and funders.
Work with us
Nobody asked us
Your mum doesn't think about how her blood pressure tablet was made. She just wants it to be safe, and to work.
But here is what nobody tells her. How well a medicine works depends on who it was tested on. Every medicine is tried on thousands of people before it reaches the pharmacy. Those people were almost never like us. Not our backgrounds. Not our genes. Not our lives.
So medicines can work less well for us. Side effects can show up that nobody warned our doctors about. And the problem passes down from parents to children.
Here is the hardest part. It is not because we said no. Most of us were never asked. And when we were asked, nobody explained anything. Nobody said what a clinical trial is. Nobody said what we would be agreeing to. Nobody said you can leave whenever you want, and your care stays exactly the same.
Our founder's father died of prostate cancer. His risk was higher because he was South Asian. Nobody told him. There were clinical trials at the time that might have helped. Nobody mentioned them. He was never asked at all.
There are thousands of stories like his. That is why Counted Health CIC exists.
We explain. That's it. That's the job.
A clinical trial is how a new medicine gets tested on people, step by step, to check it is safe and that it works. Before any of us take a medicine, it has been through clinical trials.
We run free sessions and make free guides that explain all of it, in plain words and in our languages. How medicines get made, tested and approved. What you are really agreeing to if you join a study. Your right to say no. Your right to leave at any time. What happens to your information. And how to get into the paid roles where research decisions get made.
If you want to find real research studies, we can point you to ones run by the NHS, universities and companies that follow the rules. But the decision is always yours. We explain. You decide.
We work in English, Bengali, Urdu, Arabic, Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi and Somali to start. Tell us what your community speaks.
Sessions people bring their cousins to
Nobody remembers a lecture. People remember what they did, what made them laugh, and how it felt. So at our sessions, you do things.
-
Run a clinical trial. With tea.
Two teas. Real consent forms. Names out of a hat. A blind tasting. Halfway through, someone gets up and walks out, just to show you always can. By the end, you will understand how clinical trials work, because you will have run one.
-
Look up your family's medicine.
Pick a medicine someone in your family takes. Together, we look up who it was tested on. It takes thirty seconds. You will never forget what you find.
-
Act it out.
We act out the moment a researcher asks someone to join a study. You can shout stop. You can ask the questions your auntie would ask. You can replay it the way it should have gone. In real life, you are allowed to do that too.
-
Ask anything, without saying a word.
There are cards on every table for questions you would rather not ask out loud. Every card gets answered, honestly. The hard questions come first. They are usually the best ones.
We come to where you already are. Community centres. Places of worship. Barbershops. Supper clubs. Voice notes in your language. And if we don't know an answer, we say so. Then we find out, and we come back.
People like us make this
Nothing here is designed at a desk far away and dropped on your community.
-
Your questions become the teaching.
We keep every question from every session. We answer it, and we build it into what we teach next. So the sessions are always made from what communities really asked.
-
You check our work before it goes out.
Our guides, our sessions and our translations are read by people from the communities they are for. If they say change it, we change it.
-
Your neighbours are the teachers.
Sessions are run by trained, paid people from your own community. And they become members of the company, with a real say in how it is run.
Everyone. Nobody checks at the door.
You don't need a referral. You don't give your name. You don't need to know any science. Nobody will ever ask you to join anything. If you're curious, come. If you're angry, definitely come.
To book a session for your group or venue: chat@countedhealth.org. We fit around your community's life: evenings, weekends, prayer times.
- Cost
- Free, always, and there are refreshments.
- Where
- Our first sessions are in East London. Our guides are free for any community in the UK.
- Languages
- English, Bengali, Urdu, Arabic, Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi and Somali to start. Tell us what your community speaks.
Why you can believe a word we say
-
We never recruit for any study.
Nobody can pay us to sign you up. Ever.
-
We never collect or keep your information.
There is nothing about you to sell, because we never take it.
We built Counted Health CIC so the explaining comes with nothing attached. You get the knowledge. You keep the decision.
Built to belong to the communities it serves
Counted Health CIC is being built so that, over time, it belongs to the communities themselves. Here is what that means.
-
The people are from the community.
Every session is run by trained, paid neighbours. People who live where they teach, and speak the language in every sense.
-
Members, not just helpers.
Ambassadors who train with us become members of the company. Members have a real say in what Counted Health CIC does.
-
A board from our communities.
Our directors are found through open public adverts, so anyone can apply. We are building a board where most seats belong to people from the communities we serve. Read the advert
-
The programmes are yours to run.
Community organisations can run Counted programmes themselves. We give them our manual, our training and our rules, free, always. If that work gets paid for, the community organisation shares the money. Your community's knowledge stays in your community. So does the money.
That is the whole design. The industry pays for the explaining. The communities own the explaining.
Your community trusts you. That's the qualification.
Our sessions are run by people from the communities themselves. A neighbour explaining something honestly is the most powerful teacher there is.
You don't need qualifications. You don't need a science background. You don't need to have spoken to a group before. We train all of it. We support you at every session. We pay your expenses from day one, and we pay you for every session you run.
Ambassadors also hear first about paid advisory roles in research, and we help you get there. And ambassadors become members of Counted Health CIC itself. The people doing the explaining should own the organisation that does it.
Make the explaining somebody's job
Counted Health CIC was founded by Ashish Rishi. He has spent his career working on unfair gaps in health, including nearly ten years running a company that helped researchers reach the communities studies miss.
Years of watching people be asked to join studies taught him why they say no. It is not that they don't care. It is that nobody ever explained. His father's death taught him what that costs.
So he made the explaining somebody's job.
Play the video
This video is hosted on YouTube.
Your problem is trust. Here is where trust comes from.
Trust has one source: being dealt with honestly, again and again, by people who gain nothing from your decision.
That is the design of Counted Health CIC. Education with no ask. Delivered by communities' own people. Funded so that honesty is the only product. Commission the education, and trust is what grows: in research, in medicine, and in the organisations willing to pay for explanation without asking for anything back.
The design goes further. Counted Health CIC is being built to belong to the communities it works with. Their people deliver it. Their members own a say in it. Their questions shape what it teaches, and their reviewers approve every guide and translation before release. When you commission us, you are funding something the community runs.
What we offer
Commission community education programmes
Delivered by trained local ambassadors, in trusted venues, in community languages.
You get proof the sessions happened, and totals only: how many came, what they understood before and after, how many came back. No names. No contacts. No information about any person. That is why your compliance team can approve it, and why communities believe it.
Test your clinical trial before you run it
Community advisors, trained and fairly paid, review your consent forms, information sheets and study design before your first participant ever sees them.
Their feedback goes straight to you. We keep nothing.
Train your teams
How to work well with the communities research misses, taught by people who know both sides of the table.
The rules we will never break
We publish these because they are what you are actually buying.
- No contract ever includes a target for enrolment, referrals or changed attitudes. If a participant number is what you need, we are the wrong organisation, and we will say so in the first meeting.
- We report understanding, attendance and returns, as totals only. Never willingness, feelings or trust scores. Measuring trust for a client is how trust dies.
- Our fee is for education, delivered. If a whole room understands everything and decides research is not for them, we succeeded, and the fee is earned. Informed decisions are the product. Participation is our hope, never our promise.
- We never sell knowledge about communities. To anyone. Value flows one way: into the room.
- Organisations connected to our founder get no special treatment. They get extra checks, on written arm's-length terms approved by our independent directors.
These rules are the machine. They are what makes it true when our ambassadors say: nobody is paying us to persuade you.
In the open
We publish who funds us, who commissions us, and our results, including what did not work. Ask for any of it, any time.
What we are
A community interest company limited by guarantee, number 17425338. Regulated by the CIC Regulator. Our assets are locked by law to our purpose.
If we ever close, everything passes to South Asian Health Action (charity 1171789). We are not a charity, so donations do not get Gift Aid, and we do not ask the public for donations.
How we are governed
Independent directors found through open public adverts. A board being built so most seats belong to people from the communities we serve. Membership open to trained ambassadors.
How we show our work
The same three questions before and after every session, answered without names. Published, including failures.
And trust reported the only honest way: shown, not surveyed. People coming back. Venues booking again. Communities asking for more.
What we will never do to show it
We do not turn people into case studies. Nobody's hardship is content. Every photo and every quote needs written consent, which can be taken back at any time. When a story is not ours to tell, we share the pattern, not the person.
Talk to us
- chat@countedhealth.org
- Post
- Counted Health CIC, 4th Floor, Silverstream House, 45 Fitzroy Street, London W1T 6EB