Opinion Leader Research made history on Saturday 29th October 2005 conducting the country’s first ever Citizens’ Summit – a gathering of a thousand members of the public, carefully selected to represent the nation, drawn together to discuss and vote on the future shape of community based health and social care services.
It was the largest public consultation exercise ever undertaken in the UK. Through debate and discussion members of the public learnt about the issues, understood the tradeoffs and then voted on what the priorities should be for these services. Innovative technology connected a team of analysts to the debate enabling them to track its progress, and identify common themes filtering through from the citizens’ deliberation. The technology enabled us to feed back the results to the Summit as they were analysed.
The Citizens’ Summit was part of a wider consultation Opinion Leader Research has undertaken for the Department of Health which has drawn opinion from tens of thousands of people in online surveys, more traditional written consultations, four regional forums and a variety of self-moderated events.
The Department of Health believe this project marks the beginning of a new age of policy-making: “We are not going to do consultation in the old way any more. Now the Department of Health has done this, Government will not be writing long documents and asking the usual people to read and report back. This is a completely new way of doing things; we have broken new ground here.”
On March 2nd we held a follow-on ‘Calling the Government to Account’ event, involving 100 people from the regional forums and the Citizens’ Summit. One key challenge was to see if we could improve on the end of day polling results from the earlier event, seeking to identify whether citizens believed that the consultation was likely to be influential. At the Citizen’s Summit 40% thought the results of the event would be influential in the future, but 56% were not sure. When reconvened for the ‘Calling the Government to Account’ event, 72% thought the results of the whole process had been influential – a leap of 32%.
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For more information, call Justin Doherty on 020 7861 3080 or visit www.opinionleader.co.uk
