Our approach

Engaging with values, grounded in evidence

Important health decisions always involve both evidence and values. ACHEEV operates in the space between evidence and values: we make evidence accessible to people, and then support them to make judgements about what matters most, and why. We engage with health in the context of people’s lives, and amplify the perspectives of the people who are most affected by healthcare decision-making. 

ACHEEV specialises in methods that engage with the values of members of the public, health consumers, health workers, and policymakers.

The ACHEEV team conducts qualitative and quantitative social research about people’s values and judgements in health contexts. We also run deliberative democratic processes. These bring diverse members of the public together to deliberate on policy problems and make recommendations. In a well-designed deliberative process, groups of strangers from very different backgrounds can collaborate to produce recommendations and give good reasons for those recommendations. This can provide practical and principled guidance for decision makers from the professions, regulators or government.

We often work with consumer co-researchers, including codesigned consumer-led projects, and collaborate with professional stakeholders to ensure our work is relevant to public health and health system needs.

Our work can be described as empirical ethics – combining theoretical approaches to ethics and values with empirical research to understand people’s everyday judgements. This approach can produce new knowledge about what should be done in real life health contexts. We are always striving to improve the quality of our own methods, and we publish methodological research to support and contribute to research excellence internationally.