We’ve just published our annual report and I’m keen to use this moment as an opportunity to share what we’re seeing at Here and hear more about what others are noticing in our health care system.

We know that we all want to make a difference in people’s lives, to help them and ourselves to live good and meaningful lives. At Here, our questions are about whether the system as it is currently designed can really do this.

As you’ll read in the stories and reflections in our report, we are learning that we are an organisation that sees that our health and care system can do much, much better. We are also finding ways to learn how to do better in simple and common sense ways, using the best available information and evidence.

We are also starting to understand that despite our best efforts to do what the leading edge of evidence says is the right thing to do: integrate, use each other’s skills and resources, use the skills and resources of the citizen – our attempts to help people are still not going far enough, all of the time, every time.

Our focus for 2017, is delivering on our promises, finding new ways to innovate and improve the existing systems of care, and designing and delivering new wellbeing systems. We’ll be doing this by asking and working to answer some challenging questions.

We are inviting you to engage with us and to share what these questions raise for you.

• How do we know we are making a difference from the citizen’s point of view?
• Are patient expectations and demand really rising- or is our system itself creating excessive demand that adds no value to a citizen’s wellbeing?
• Could it be possible that if we understood what matters to people and delivered it first time that there is more resource in our current systems to meet needs than we realise?
• How do we understand what matters when someone asks for help? How do we design to deliver that? And how do we measure our impact from the person’s perspective and the population perspective?

We seek, humbly, to play a part in helping the collective conversation about our health and care systems to move from one of fear and scarcity to one of clarity and courage so that we can create possibilities for care in every moment. I hope you will continue to join me and our teams in this journey together.

Zoe Nicholson was a co-founder of Here.

Read Zoe’s blog

Follow Zoe on Twitter @zoenicholson4