Looking back on 20 years of public engagement in Canadian health policy… What’s changed and what hasn’t?

The Public Engagement in Health Policy project is excited to announce our research report, Trends in Public Engagement in Canadian Health Policy from 2000 - 2021: Results from a Comparative Descriptive Analysis. Our team collected and analyzed 132 cases of government-initiated public engagement cases across federal, provincial, and pan-Canadian levels. We report on various aspects of engagement, including approaches and recruitment methods, populations targeted, priority given to marginalized populations, and sectors of concentrated engagement activity. We note a predominance of passive, top-down engagement approaches with an undefined public, which we argue prioritizes the appearance of breadth over inclusivity and empowerment. 

 This case survey is a foundational piece of the ‘Looking Back’ phase of our project, which assesses the history of public engagement efforts in Canadian health policy since the early 2000s. The project’s next phases focus on ‘Taking Stock’ and ‘Moving Forward.’ Our case survey findings point to areas for improvement which will be explored in future research activities. The project blog will ask and address important questions stemming from this case survey, including why certain engagement approaches and recruitment methods are prioritized over others, how public engagement can be more inclusive of marginalized populations, and what the future of engagement in health policy may look like. Future research will delve into topics such as public engagement in long-term care, the strengths and weaknesses of online engagement platforms, and deliberation in health policy. This report is unique in its examination of over 100 cases of government-initiated public engagement in health policy over a 20-year period. We hope the results will catalyze discussion about transformative approaches for governments to engage with publics to address pressing health issues. We encourage you to read the report and explore the data.

To contact the team, email publicengagement@mcmaster.ca.

You can also access our full dataset in Excel here or through Notion here. The Notion spreadsheet is only for web-based viewing of our data. For full functionality please use the Excel spreadsheet.