Patient partnership shaping national approaches to indoor air quality

Patricia Ripoll, founder of the VISIBLE Foundation in Spain and patient advisor to BMJ Group, has spent more than a decade advancing patient involvement across healthcare. Through the foundation, she leads more than 15 projects supporting patient co-design across health systems, innovation, and policy. 

Her work highlights the cost of not involving patients. She has seen how solutions can take years to develop but fail to meet real needs. This includes work on the “invisible” needs of stroke survivors, bringing together patients and innovators to identify unmet needs after discharge and translate these into new services and solutions. 

As a patient advisor to BMJ Group, Ripoll brings the perspective of a patient-led organisation working at the intersection of lived experience, evidence, innovation, and system change. Her role within this international advisory community allows her to contribute practical, patient-led insight to global conversations on healthcare knowledge, priorities, and improvement, helping extend the impact of her work beyond Spain.

Following the covid-19 pandemic, Ripoll led a multi-stakeholder initiative to address indoor air quality in shared spaces. Working with patients, scientists, architects, and public health experts, the group focused on a largely invisible risk affecting population health.

This led to the development of a certification framework for indoor air quality in Spain, providing a clear indicator of ventilation quality and associated health risk in shared environments. The work builds on wider collaborations, including initiatives such as Aireamos, a multi-stakeholder programme focused on improving indoor air quality through patient, scientific, and public health collaboration.

The approach is already influencing practice:

• adopted within architectural training and design processes
• used by organisations to demonstrate safer environments
• positioned to inform future regulatory requirements

This is an example of patient partnership moving beyond consultation to implementation, shaping systems rather than individual projects.