The LEEFH Foundation wins the People's Choice Award for Most Brilliant Failure!

Yesterday, the Institute for Brilliant Failures presented its Healthcare Award. It may sound like a joke, but there is a serious background to it. We tend to keep failures quiet; naturally, we prefer to share success stories. That's a shame, because failures are the best teachers. In healthcare, in science, but also in your personal life. The LEEFH Foundation won the public award for themost brilliant failure in healthcare in 2018! 

Brilliant failure?
What is a brilliant failure? A well-developed and well-thought-out plan that nevertheless fails due to something you did not foresee or could not foresee in advance. The Institute for Brilliant Failures (IVBM) has compiled a list of twenty archetypes that can help identify and learn from failures.

Take "The Junk," for example: something fails because you kept going and refused to admit that it was a hopeless project. "A deal is a deal!", "If you just keep at it, you'll succeed!" or "Giving up is not in my vocabulary!" are statements you often hear in projects like this.

Or "The canyon": In life, we develop routines and habits that eventually become so natural that we don't realize they are sometimes not helpful. Practical example: the approach that works for one child may have the opposite effect on another child.

The LEEFH Foundation is extremely proud to have won the public award for 'brilliant failure in healthcare'.
The lessons learned from this failure:

1. Not everything can be foreseen. Funding was discontinued, even though the need for population screening proved to be greater than previously thought due to a higher prevalence.
2. Unilateral dependence on funding makes one vulnerable, especially when it comes to prevention activities. Unfortunately, funding prevention remains difficult because the party that bears the costs is not always the one that reaps the benefits.
3. It is important to substantiate plans properly and calculate them thoroughly. When the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport was approached, the exact knowledge and figures needed to demonstrate the necessity were not yet available. In response to this, a business case was drawn up in collaboration with the consultancy firm Vintura. This business case will form the basis for a new attempt to actively detect FH patients.
4. When drawing up the business case, it became clear that attention should not only be focused on detection. In the same chain, proper diagnosis and subsequent treatment also require sufficient attention. Only then can the investment that needs to be made in population screening achieve its intended return.

Read more on the website of the Most Brilliant Failure.