Beyond tick boxes: better public engagement

I’ve spent much of the past decade either attending or chairing healthcare-related meetings where the public were invited to join. While these can be immensely valuable, they can also be a box-ticking farce. Being genuinely open and transparent can be vital in maintaining, or developing, trust.

In my time as Chair of NICE, I was constantly aware that we were making difficult and often controversial decisions, and so the best way of dispelling distrust was by being as open as possible to public scrutiny. Our public board meetings were held around the country – Kendal, Exeter, Colchester, Leeds, and all points north and south – and before the main meeting we offered a wholly open Q&A session with the chair and chief executive.

For me, this was the closest that my work ever got to my previous role as a GP, facing questions about anything and everything with no warning. But the feedback we had from those who attended was immensely positive. If you are prepared to be open, you are much more likely to be trusted. If you hide away, paranoia and conspiracy theories will thrive.

If you are prepared to be open, you are much more likely to be trusted. If you hide away, paranoia and conspiracy theories will thrive.

Within Kaleidoscope, we think video-conferencing and digital meetings can offer much more genuine, public engagement than ever before. It isn’t simply a matter of putting your old style of meeting on-line. That’s something that you should only continue doing if you are quite certain that you already get high quality and broad public engagement. If you don’t, or if you are involved in making controversial decisions – either locally or nationally – and you need to encourage openness and develop trust, then think again.

Encourage openness and follow up

For instance, instead of the usual paperwork, try having short videos of people talking through the papers on your website, focusing particularly on questions where you would welcome input from the public. Try asking for comments on the papers ahead of the meeting through a survey with different levels of detail depending how much people want to get involved.

You could maybe run the actual meeting both as a Teams meeting – with the potential for a small number of public participants to join as attendees – and live streaming it through YouTube.

You could encourage comments on the meeting as you go along through Twitter and/or YouTube comments, where you could specifically say you’re not going to deal with all of them in the meeting, but that you will consider them afterwards. And you could even record a short ‘post meeting key points’ video with a couple of the lead participants as another way for people to get involved.

And if that all sounds like more work than it is worth, you might even need to ask if you really do want public engagement, or just want to tick the “public engagement” box and carry on as before. My experience tells me that openness can be a lot of hassle, but it also pays massive dividends.

If your work is in any way controversial, or if being trusted by being open might help your cause, then this might just be the opportunity you need.