Crowdsourcing practical ideas for improving public health services
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The challenge
Metro South Health is the major provider of public health services, education and research across Brisbane's south side, Logan, Redlands and Scenic Rim regions of Queensland, serving a population of around one million people. The area is vast and its communities are hugely diverse, meaning that understanding and responding to the evolving health needs of patients is an ongoing challenge. Good quality patient engagement is essential, but the organisation recognised that formal consultation alone was not enough. To keep pace with the needs of such a varied population, they needed a way to continuously improve their services from the ground up.
The approach
Metro South Health already used Citizen Space for formal consultation and targeted feedback. For their Futures Lab project, however, they turned to Dialogue, using it as a hub for crowdsourcing, testing and implementing practical improvements to their health services. The project runs across three stages: ideas generation, design and testing, and delivery. Dialogue supports the first stage, hosting what the team branded as "ideas jams": open challenges through which members of the public, health professionals and stakeholders can submit ideas, comment on others' suggestions and rate contributions. Each challenge included a set of prompt questions, which also served as a useful way to categorise responses once the challenge closed.
The results
Each ideas jam attracted nearly 100 submissions from a wide range of contributors, including industry experts, patients and members of the public drawing on personal experience. The format, which built in a "win scenario" where the strongest ideas would be selected for real-world development and delivery, encouraged participants to provide thoughtful and detailed contributions. The result was a rich body of stakeholder insight and patient engagement that Metro South Health can draw on to make their services more accessible, efficient and effective for the communities they serve.
Delib is a govtech leader specialising in consultation and engagement, trusted by over 600 government organisations worldwide, including major planning projects. Since 2004, we've been building secure, accessible digital platforms to make participation simpler, fairer, and more inclusive. Our flagship product, Citizen Space, was built in collaboration with the UK government and has supported more than 11 million responses across over 110,000 democratic activities.