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In 2002 Canadians were less anxious about the state of their health care system than they were a few years earlier, when perceptions peaked that the system needed major reform. They expressed strong support in 2002 for maintaining the status quo on health care financing (that is, no user fees and no two-tier care) within the traditional domains of physician and hospital care. But they appeared more receptive to two-tier care and for-profit delivery for the newer and rapidly expanding domains of home care and high-tech care.

How to involve the public in setting health and health care priorities is a constant challenge for health system decisions. Policy maker interest in involving the public in increasingly complex and value-laden priority setting processes has led to the use of deliberative public involvement methods designed to promote discussion and debate among participants with the objective of obtaining more informed and consensual views. These methods have not been evaluated rigorously using controlled designs with pre- and post-test measurements. We examined, using a controlled design, the effects of introducing different opportunities for deliberation into a process for obtaining public input into a community health goals priority setting process. Our findings indicate that deliberation does make a difference to participant views. As more deliberation is introduced, participant views may be more amenable to change. Deliberation also offers the potential for views to become more rather than less entrenched. While we are beginning to understand the difference deliberation makes to participant views, we are still at an early stage in understanding the process through which these differences come about and what difference deliberation makes to broader outcomes such as civic competence, civic engagement and health policy decisions.

Abstract: To resolve tensions among competing sources of evidence and public expectations, health-care managers and policy makers are turning more than ever to involve the public in a wide range of decisions. Yet efforts to use research evidence to inform public involvement decisions are hampered by an absence of rigorous public participation evaluation research. In particular, greater rigour in exploring the roles played by different contextual variables—such as characteristics of the issue of interest, the culture of the sponsoring organization and attributes of the decision being made—is needed. Using a comparative quasi-experimental design, we assessed the performance of a generic public participation method implemented in 5 Canadian regionalized health settings between 2001 and 2004. Participant and decision-maker perspectives were assessed and, through direct observation, the roles exerted by contextual variables over the public involvement processes were documented and analysed. Our findings demonstrate that a generic public participation method can be implemented in a variety of contexts and with considerable success. Context exerts fostering and inhibiting influences that contribute to more (or less) successful implementation. Public participation practitioners are encouraged to pay careful attention to the types of issues and decisions for which they are seeking public input. Sufficient organizational resources and commitment to the goals of the public participation process are also required. Attention to these contextual attributes and their influence on the design and outcomes of public participation processes is as important as choosing the “right” public participation mechanism. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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Gives a brief description of the process, the outcome, and the effects of the Romanow Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada, which entailed a dialogue with representative cross-sections of the Canadian population. View that the legitimacy and sustainability of any major policy decisions depends on how well it reflects the underlying values of the public; Mention of ChoiceWork dialogues, which were created by Viewpoint Learning and based on the research of its chairman, Daniel Yankelovich; Way that the dialogues engage members of the public on important issues before the decisions are made; Impact of combining the roles of citizens as taxpayers and patients on the debate; Opinion that engaging the public in this way is more costly than polling, but is essential when making difficult decisions. INSETS: Summary points;Box 1: Basic steps in a ChoiceWork dialogue project;Box 2: Four scenarios for the future of health care in Canada;Box 3: Participants' own words (extracted from session...