Be Counted. Be Heard.
New medicines get tested on people. Some communities are hardly ever among them.
Counted Health CIC explains health research and clinical trials, in plain language, so that when someone takes part, they know exactly what they are agreeing to.
Three ways in
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Want a session for your community?
Free, friendly, in your venue, in your language.
Book a session -
Want to help run sessions?
We train volunteers from the community, and pay expenses and a stipend.
Become an ambassador -
Sponsor, researcher or funder?
What we offer, how we're governed, and how we show our work.
Work with us
Three things, and nothing else
We explain.
Free sessions and free written guides about how health research and clinical trials work. What a clinical trial is. What consent really means. Your right to say no, and to leave at any time. What happens to your information. How to get into the paid roles where research is designed.
We signpost.
We point people towards a broad range of genuine research opportunities across the NHS, universities and properly run commercial studies. What we never do is recruit for any study: nobody can pay Counted Health CIC to sign people up, and no session ever ends with an ask.
We do it in our languages.
English, Bengali, Urdu, Arabic, Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi and Somali to start. Tell us what your community speaks.
People remember what they did, long after they forget what they were told
The norm in this field is a slide deck, a leaflet and an expert at the front of the room. Counted Health CIC does not do the norm.
We teach through creative methods, arts and experiences, because people remember what they did and felt long after they forget what they were told.
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The mock clinical trial
Our signature session. Two teas, real consent forms, names from a hat, blind tasting, and someone walking out halfway to prove you always can. Twenty minutes, a lot of laughter, and a room that now understands consent, randomisation, placebo and the right to leave, because they experienced all four.
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The medicine cabinet
People name a medicine their family actually takes, and together we look up who was in the clinical trials behind it. The case for representation, made personally, in thirty seconds.
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Forum theatre
A consent conversation performed live, where anyone in the room can shout stop, challenge the researcher, and replay the scene their way. The message is the method: you are allowed to interrupt this process.
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The question wall
Anonymous cards at every session for the questions people would rather not ask out loud. Every question gets answered, honestly, and the answers are published. The hard questions and the hostile ones are the ones we want most.
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Where life already happens
Community centres, places of worship, barbershops, salons, supper clubs, community radio, WhatsApp voice notes in community languages. The setting is part of the method: a trusted place lends its trust to what is said in it.
And if we do not know an answer, we say so, find out, and come back. That is a method too.
Everyone is welcome. Nobody checks at the door.
You do not need a referral. You do not need to be ill, or a patient, or to know anything about science. You do not need to give your name, and nobody will ever ask you to join a study.
Sessions are for the communities health research usually misses: ethnic minority communities, people on low incomes, and disabled people. But nobody checks at the door. If you're curious, come.
To book a session for your community group, venue or organisation, email hello@countedhealth.org. We arrange times around your community's life: evenings, weekends, and around prayer times.
- Where
- Anywhere in the UK. Our first sessions run in East London, and our free guides are for any community, any group, anywhere in the country. If you want sessions in your area, ask: hello@countedhealth.org.
- Cost
- Nothing. Sessions are free, refreshments included. Always.
- Languages
- English, Bengali, Urdu, Arabic, Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi and Somali to start. Tell us what your community speaks.
Two rules
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We never recruit for any study.
We signpost widely and independently, but no researcher, company or university can pay Counted Health CIC to sign people up. We explain, people decide.
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We never collect or hold research data.
Nothing about the people who come to our sessions is recorded, sold or shared.
These rules are why people can trust what we say.
A neighbour explaining something honestly beats an expert with a slide deck
Our sessions are run by people from the communities themselves, because a neighbour explaining something honestly beats an expert with a slide deck every time.
You don't need qualifications, a science background, or experience of speaking to groups. We train all of it. You need to be part of the community you'd work with, and the kind of person people trust.
You get full training, support at every session, expenses from day one, and a stipend for every session you deliver. Ambassadors also get first sight of paid advisory roles in health research, and our help moving into them.
Make the explaining somebody's job
Counted Health CIC was founded by Ashish Rishi.
In 2002 Ashish lost his father to prostate cancer. His symptoms went unrecognised, and nobody told him about the clinical trials running at the time. South Asian and Black men carry a higher risk of prostate cancer. Nobody told him that either.
Ashish has spent his career on health inequities, including nearly ten years running a company that helped researchers reach the communities studies usually miss. That work taught him why most people say no. It is not that they do not care about their health. It is that nobody has ever explained what they are being asked to join.
Counted Health CIC is his answer: make the explaining somebody's job.
Commission the explaining, or test your trial before you run it
What we offer
Commissioned education programmes
Sponsors, CROs, the NHS and universities commission Counted Health CIC to run education series in specific communities or health areas: for example, eight evenings on diabetes research in Bangladeshi communities, delivered in Sylheti and English by trained local ambassadors.
You receive delivery confirmation and aggregate attendance numbers. You receive no names, no contacts, no data about anyone. That is exactly why your compliance team can approve it, and why communities trust it.
Test your clinical trial before you run it
Your consent forms, patient information sheets, visit schedules and study design, reviewed by trained, fairly paid community advisors before your first participant ever sees them. They tell you what is unclear, what is off-putting, and what would make taking part impossible for people like them, directly to you, in facilitated sessions.
Counted Health CIC trains the advisors, brokers the sessions and ensures fair payment; the insight passes from advisors to you, and we keep nothing. Better designed clinical trials meet better informed communities, and both sides gain.
Training for research teams
How to work with underserved communities properly: language, settings, trust, and what not to do. Delivered by people who know both sides of the table.
What we are
Counted Health CIC is a community interest company limited by guarantee, registered in England and Wales, company number 17425338, incorporated August 2026. A CIC is not a charity: we are regulated by the CIC Regulator and our assets are locked to our community purpose by law.
If Counted Health CIC ever closed, everything it owns would pass to South Asian Health Action (registered charity 1171789), our named asset-locked body. Because we are not a charity, donations do not attract Gift Aid; we are funded by grants and commissioned programmes, and we do not seek public donations.
How we're governed
Two independent directors are being recruited now through open public advert, building towards a board where most directors come from the communities Counted Health CIC serves. All commercial relationships, including any involving organisations connected to the founder, are conducted on arm's-length written terms approved by the independent directors.
Our experience
The founder has spent his career on health inequities, sits on the Scientific Advisory Board of IHI READI, a European project on representative clinical research, and hosts Now Written: Live, an interview series with patient advocates from underserved communities.
Our methods are built on the published evidence about what works in community health engagement: insider delivery, trusted settings, experiential learning, and repeated presence rather than one-off visits.
How we show our work
We measure understanding at every session: the same three questions before and after, answered anonymously. We publish what we find, including what does not work. We report reach, return rates and volunteer progression as aggregated numbers.
What we will not do to show our work
We do not turn people into case studies. Nobody's hardship is content. We never photograph or quote anyone without written, informed consent that they can withdraw at any time, and when a story is not ours to tell, we share the pattern, not the person. Dignity is not a constraint on our evidence. It is part of it.
Talk to us
- hello@countedhealth.org
- Post
- Counted Health CIC, 4th Floor, Silverstream House, 45 Fitzroy Street, London W1T 6EB