Just had a chance to participate in a process of citizen deliberation for health planning for the Metro North Region.

This is a formal process highly structured and organised but extremely effective in getting quality initiatives and priorities.

This one was done as a partnership between an Australian Research Council research team from Curtin University of Technology in WA and Queensland Health’s Primary and Community Health Services for Metro North Health.

Participants were selected by 3 processes: nominations from the community random selection from the community and some chosen. About 200 people applied and 100 were selected at random from these.

Participants were paid a $100 fee to participate.

The event (Talking about Health in my Community) was heavily backed up by technology trained facilitators and formal scribes inputting directly into laptops on each table.

The process started (after introductory talks by leaders of the health team) with participants silently writing down their own answers to a discussion question. These answers were then shared one at a time at the table and voted on for whether everyone at the table agreed. Anyone not agreeing was asked to elaborate their concerns. The discussion continued to take these concerns into account and reach agreement. This was done for each participant’s points.

The agreed points were then input directly into the laptop at the table and the participants’ own words were used. Input from each table went directly to a team of people behind the scenes who put the input from the 13 tables together.

These were then printed out and given back to the people at the tables to prioritise (by a method of each ‘spending an imaginary $100’ allocating dollar amounts to the different items according to the priority they would accord them. The data for each person were then entered directly into the laptop at the table and summarised results for the whole room were available within a few minutes. New initiatives suggested by participants were then ranked (by a similar ‘spend $100’ process) according to the top-ranked priorities.

All participants were provided with a full printout of the results for the day.

The input from all participants will be very valuable in the planning process for delivering health services to the 900000 residents of the Metro North Local Health & Hospital Network region.

The citizen deliberation process is the subject of ARC research and it is hoped to use it more frequently.

It is certainly a process we could use locally more informally to help us plan locally.