Can digital add rocket fuel to NHS England’s citizens’ assembly?

Can digital add rocket fuel to NHS England’s citizens’ assembly?

by | Oct 21, 2013 | NHS stuff, social media | 0 comments

Recently Tim Kelsey, NHS England’s National Director for Patients and Information, blogged  about his aspirations for a new citizens’ assembly – he wants it to be the next step in putting ‘patient participation at the heart of its [NHS] decision making’. Whatever! I confess my first reaction to reading the post was ‘yeah whatever’ [you can tell I have teenagers] I have heard such platitudes so many times before – words like ‘empowerment’ and ‘participation’ trip nicely off the tongue, but how often to we involve citizens really well in the NHS and how routinely do we quantify what difference their involvement has made. It can be too easy to focus on the process at expense of the outcome; involve people too late or half-heartedly; get tied up in professional structures, management hierarchies and just sheer workload with reduced resources, all of which can work against us involving people really well. But whilst I can feel jaded about the context, I can’t help but feel moved by Tim Kelsey’s intent. I know that when I’ve had the opportunity to involve people using services really well (be it from recruiting new staff to setting up new projects and services) it has been a nourishing and rewarding experience and we’ve achieved something more than we could have done on our own. Rocket fuel So what will make Tim Kelsey’s words really count for something?  I wonder if part of the answer may lie in the confluence of his two areas of responsibility – technology and participation. I have previously blogged about how I believe social media affords the flattening of hierarchies,...
#AboutMeLeeds – digital as a tool for citizen participation

#AboutMeLeeds – digital as a tool for citizen participation

by | Oct 8, 2013 | #AboutMeLeeds, social media | 1 comment

It strikes me as a little foolhardy to write a blog post on a topic I know precious little about and on one to which I have given very little thought. But on this occasion that’s sort of the point… A couple of weeks ago if you’d attempted to have a conversation with me about data privacy you’d have been pretty disappointed – I confess I had not give it a great deal thought; that was until we decided to do an experiment in online citizen participation during the Leeds Digital Festival, and this emerged as topic about which health and social care organisations really want to have a conversation with the citizens of Leeds. Ok… so health and social care organisations are interested; but the nagging question in the back of my mind was (and is) would the citizens of Leeds be the slightest bit interested? Doesn’t  the argument tend to go ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide then why would you care who knows what about you anyway?’ But the more I’ve pondered, the more I realise that I am quite bothered. I’m bothered about the fact that Facebook use my age and gender data (willingly supplied by me of course) to allow marketers to pop wrinkle cream and diet product ads on my timeline. I’m bothered that a hospital might not properly treat my son’s impressively extreme and rare allergy properly if they can’t access his GP data. I’m bothered that I regularly get convincing illegal texts and emails trying to elicit my bank details. I’m also a little bit bothered (when I give it serious...