About the Helsen Institute

The Helsen Institute for Public Research is an independent, nonpartisan research institute founded in 2026. We publish clear, verifiable syntheses of public evidence — on public health and health systems, demographic change, public trust in institutions, research methods, and the integrity of public statistics — written so that any careful reader can check them.

#Mission

Public debate increasingly runs on numbers and studies, while the definitions, methods and caveats behind them stay out of view. Our mission is to close that gap: to explain what public evidence actually shows, how it was produced, and how much weight it can bear — without advocacy, and in language that does not require a research degree.

We do not campaign, endorse candidates or parties, or lobby. Where a question involves values as well as evidence, we say so and stop at the evidence.

#What we publish

• Explainers — what a concept, measure or system is and how to read claims about it, such as our explainer on excess mortality.
• Primers — structured introductions to a whole subject, such as population ageing or randomised controlled trials.
• Reviews — assessments of the measurement landscape on a question, such as how public trust is measured.
• Insights — shorter analyses of how statistics and evidence are used and misused in public debate.

Work is organised into five focus areas, supported by a glossary of citable definitions.

#Principles

• Independence. No funder, partner or platform has editorial involvement in our work.
• Transparency. Every publication names its sources, states its limitations, and carries publication and revision dates.
• Accessibility. Everything we publish is free to read, openly licensed, and written in plain language.

#Independence and funding

The Institute is independently governed. We do not accept funding that is conditioned on the direction, framing or conclusions of our research, and funders have no editorial role. Funding disclosures are maintained on this page and updated as they change.

#Editorial standards

Our sourcing rules, review process, revision policy and corrections policy are documented in full on the methodology page. In brief: claims trace to named, checkable sources; publications state what they do not show; and corrections are made in the text, dated, and acknowledged.

#Citing and reusing our work

All content is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may republish, translate and adapt it — including commercially — with attribution to the Helsen Institute for Public Research and a link to the source page. Every publication includes a ready-made citation in its “How to cite” section, and machine-readable versions of our content are available at /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt.

#Contact

For questions, media enquiries, or to report a suspected error, see the contact page or write to contact@helseninstitute.org.