What you told us about consumer or community consultation!

Following on from last month’s Team Brief, we asked you to complete a survey on our new community engagement platform – Bang the Table. In order to give you the experience of using the platform for yourselves, we set up a staff demo page so you could see the site and tell us about some of the work you’ve been doing, or might have in planning!

Thank you to those of you who took the time to do this, here is what your responses told us:

Almost 70% of you said that you have been involved in work to support consumer or community consultation in the past 12 months. For 2 in 3 of these staff members, information from consultation activities informs your work, whilst almost half (46%) of these people design, plan and organise consumer consultation activities.

When asked to what extent you feel ‘connected to’ the outcome or findings of any consultation you have had a role in, almost 42% said ‘very’ and just over 37% of responses were ‘neutral’. See the results below:

Looking forward, almost 35% of you will be involved in designing, planning or organising consumer consultation activities in the next 6 months. Whist 2 in 3 of these people are thinking about using a focus group/s or survey for the consultation, other approaches mentioned include interview/s or evaluation panels.

We asked how you anticipate recruiting consumers for planned consultation/s. More than half of you said ‘by personal invitation’ or ‘through service provider links’, the next most popular response being ‘word of mouth’.

Of the staff members who will be involved in planning consumer consultation activities in the next 6 months, half of you said you are ‘extremely likely’ to want to use an online engagement tool.

We then asked you what the focus of future consumer consultation may be (what you hope to find out). Some key comments included:

  • ‘input into design of new service model’
  • ‘best approach to improving health literacy and providing empowerment’
  • ‘how to involve consumers in the design of innovative projects’
  • ‘patient experience and satisfaction’
  • ‘how people manage their journey through the health system across the border and back.’

We also asked you to use one word to describe how you were feeling, and it seems like we may have caught some of you at a busy time! Your responses are summarised below:


For those of you who had a good look around the site and responded to the quick poll, your preferred super power was …

TELEPORTATION!

Next Steps

If you would like to know more about using this tool for a specific project, please contact Kristine Laird or Jo Risk.

Consultation has concluded