Phase One: Research
Canada has a rich history of public engagement in the health sector. From the 1964 and 2002 Royal Commissions on Health led by Justice Emmet Hall and the honorable Roy Romanow to Patient and Family Advisory Councils, Canadian scholars and health system leaders have pioneered innovations in public engagement. But current political, economic and social challenges call for critical reflection on this history to assess whether current approaches to engaging Canadian ‘publics’ are up to the task – and whether these approaches can meet these challenges brought into sharp relief by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Current challenges include:
Unpredictable policy time horizons that may limit opportunities for meaningful engagement.
Calls for significant additional public investments (e.g., pharmacare, long-term care), as governments struggle to sustain current health care spending levels.
Requirements (and opportunities) for shifts to digital engagement platforms.
Highly mobilized and social media savvy citizens, patent and family coalitions - meanwhile, many other voices go unheard.
We began by developing a shared understanding of key terms and concepts. These include the concepts of public engagement; the public (including citizens, patients, and caregivers); trust; democratic legitimacy; representation; inclusion, equity and justice; policy learning; and policy responsiveness.
Outputs of this phase will include a series of accessible, policy-friendly articles, podcasts, videos and/or webinars that offer critical and interdisciplinary reflection on the past, present and future of public engagement in the health sector.
Areas of Research
Looking Back
Assess the history of public engagement efforts in the health sector in Canada since the early 2000s
Taking Stock
Reflect on current engagement efforts and how they address the goals of democratic legitimacy, policy responsiveness and increased trust between governments and citizens
Looking Forward
Identify new approaches to public engagement in health policy that respond to calls for more inclusive and transformative processes
Current Projects
Black community-led engagement
When health policymakers make efforts to engage the ‘public’, there are many equity gaps that emerge when one looks closely at the communities and voices represented. This includes low levels of engagement with Black communities in particular. However, simply identifying this as ‘a gap’ masks that fact that Black communities are not passively waiting for policymakers to take an interest in them. Our research will focus on the period since COVID emerged to examine how Black community leaders in Ontario have proactively mobilized around health issues affecting their communities, and the extent to which they have or have not engaged policymakers in the process.
Case survey of government-initiated public engagement in health policy
Canada has a rich history of public engagement in health policy. To get a better understanding of this history, we are creating a repository of selected government-initiated public engagement cases in the health sector from 2000 to 2021. We hope this case survey will provide a useful resource to describe the landscape of public engagement in Canada over the past 20 years and will provide key insights to inform further exploration of these cases, for example, within specific policy sectors, over time or by engagement method.
Read the Report: Trends in Public Engagement in Canadian Health Policy from 2000 - 2021: Results from a Comparative Descriptive Analysis.
Read the Release: Looking back on 20 years of public engagement in Canadian health policy… What’s changed and what hasn’t?
Deliberation in health policy
Deliberation requires deep and reasoned discussion to inform rational decision-making and is a relatively novel approach to engaging the public in health policy. We will be doing an in-depth case study to better understand how policymakers conceptualize deliberation, why they use deliberation over other methods of engagement, and how deliberation has shaped health policy, to deepen our understanding of how policymakers conduct public engagement.
Read the Article: Deliberating with purpose: Deliberative civic engagement for health policy (Canadian Public Administration)
Public engagement in long-term care (LTC) policymaking
While calls for quality improvement in Canada’s long-term care sector were made before the COVID-19 pandemic, the attention and need to address this issue has become far more pressing. This project aims to explore public engagement in the long-term care policy sector in Canada, specifically, whether and how long-term care residents and their families have been involved at different points in time. The patterns and trends in public engagement identified will inform our thinking about how to build stronger partnerships for future LTC governance and policymaking. Data will be collected from policy documents and one-on-one interviews with key informants.
Digital engagement during COVID-19
COVID-19 has forced us all into an online space. Public engagement has been no different. We are currently carrying out an international review of cases of online deliberation during COVID-19 to understand how well this type of engagement shifted to a virtual space. We expect this review to provide useful insights and lessons learned for future online deliberation.
Read the Report: Assessing good practice in the online public sphere: A descriptive evaluation of virtual deliberation in the COVID-19 era
Download the Appendix: Assessing good practice in the online public sphere: Appendix 1
Supporting equity-centred engagement
As groups and organizations seek to bring a stronger equity focus to their engagement work, there are many things to consider and a growing number of resources to support this work. This project offers a step-by-step guide to help engagement practitioners, patient partners, partnering organizations and others in the public and patient engagement sphere navigate the many helpful resources that exist to support equity-centred engagement. The guide is available in both online interactive and printable PDF versions.
View the guide: Supporting equity-centred engagement: A step-by-step guide with tailored resources