The health service is currently locked in the middle of the election tug of war, with the two main parties putting the NHS right at the top of their agendas and talking loudly of radical reform. There is at least one thing they’re agreed on, though: both the Conservatives and the Labour Party, in their manifestos officially launched this week, are committed to more closely connecting citizens and patients with the decisions made about their health care provision. Labour’s proposal is for ‘a patient-centred NHS’ with ‘patient power increased’, and the Conservatives plan to ‘decentralise power, so that patients have a real choice’ and to ‘make doctors and nurses accountable to patients’. Whoever ends up in power, the NHS is going to have to keep getting better at public involvement and participation.
Of course, this will likely require large programmes of change management, significant and slow culture shifts, considerable investment and training etc etc but we think there are also easy ways to get started – especially online, where things move quickly and from where a lot of this drive for citizen participation is coming. Here’s our quick list on 4 super-simple ways that you can become an increasingly participative, web-savvy decision-making organisation in next-to-no time:
- Get a feel for the language and culture of online interaction: get yourself on Twitter, join some forums, spend half an hour reading YouTube comment threads or browsing Facebook issue discussions, check out the comments in previous open interaction initiatives (anything from MyStarbucksIdea to Obama’s Open for Questions) or find a campaign you personally are interested in and see how it plays out – just take some time to get a feel for how people talk, what makes things easy for them and what expectations are online. Do this as an individual first, not an official organisational presence. If someone tries to tell you this ‘isn’t real work’, simply point out that they wouldn’t want a communications officer sending out press releases or letters to residents without reading the papers or familiarising themselves with local issues. The internet may be a newer channel but the importance of understanding audiences with whom you’re trying to communicate is the same.
- Take your existing consultation work online: you almost certainly do a fair amount of public engagement and involvement work already. Often, though, it’s underplayed online and the potential reach/impact of the work goes unfulfilled. By continually making it easier for people to find information about your consultations, community events or LINks programmes, you increase the efficiency and effectiveness of that work. That’s why we came up with Opinion Suite‘s Consultation Finder and why several local authorities are already using it – by putting the information in one place, making it easy to explore and distribute, it helps online audiences find ways to engage with your organisation really easily. And because it just facilitates existing work, it doesn’t need to go through huge sign-off chains; it’s a quick win to build on what you’re already doing.
- See if people are already talking about issues relevant to you online: and if they are, find out what they’re saying. There’s never been so much opinion shared as there now is online and it’s never been easier to tap into that volume of opinion. Try looking for your name on a board search, or seeing who’s linking to you through Google; find out if someone’s put together a list of Twitterers in your area and check out what issues they’re talking about; keep abreast of discussions on local newspaper websites and comments about services in your area on things like Patient Opinion or NHS Choices. Building up familiarity with this audience and this kind of engagement is the best way to help prepare for building it into your process more formally – and people often find themselves inspired or coming up with new ideas as a result of just seeing what’s out there.
- Run a pilot exercise with staff or trusted stakeholders: the potential of online interaction is vast and in a lot of ways it’s really easy to dive in with social media etc – but there’s also no denying there are lots of nuances in effectively communicating online, and you might well be nervous about the pressire to get a whole new way of working completely right the first time. We’ve found that it can be helpful to run a test first, a kind of dress rehearsal, to get the hang of both the technology and the tone by running a pilot exercise with staff or trusted stakeholders. We particularly encourage this with our Dialogue App – as a policy crowd-sourcing tool, it’s one of the tools with most potential for radically changing how the decision-making process takes place. That’s why we offer a free version that you can use for up to 100 days or 100 users: it lets you get hands-on with this kind of exercise and try it out before deciding if it’s appropriate for public engagement work. We’ve seen what happens when organisations do embrace the potential of this way of working so we’re confident that if you try it, you’ll like it!
There’s some thoughts from us – but where do you stand on this stuff? Are the parties on the right track? What have they perhaps not taken into consideration? What will be the biggest benefits and what are the biggest risks of more closely connecting the public with decisions? What would be the biggest help to you in changing to this way of working? We think online participation is only a good thing but we also know that it’s never quite that simple – and we love talking about the nitty gritty of making it a practicable reality.
Want some more tips, ideas and guidance for connecting people with decision-making online? Drop me a line to request a copy of ‘The Good Online Policy-Making Guide‘ – a 24 page booklet full of advice and examples for each stage of the policy-making process.
