Public and patient involvement/participation is a vital part of the work of health organisations (for example, Beth Johnson from NHS England told us that ‘engagement is at the heart of everything we do’). And, of course, that activity needs to include an online component.

Consequently, the ability to run good quality, effective online surveys and public consultations is increasingly important for health organisations. And lots of them have chosen to adopt Citizen Space – our all-in-one-place digital consultation platform– to better connect with people online.

Here are 5 examples of how different UK health organisations are using the same platform to run their online public involvement activity:

  1. NHS England: hugely varied range of surveys and public consultations, at both a local and national level – some with hundreds of questions, or thousands of respondents. Also make creative use of the Citizen Space platform to manage signup for in-person events and gather course feedback.
    Screenshot of NHS England Citizen Space
  2. Camden Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG): lots of surveys on a wide range of topics – everything from feedback on the experience of making an enquiry to a patient survey on improving musculoskeletal services in the area.
    Screen Shot 2016-01-18 at 13.14.36
  3. Department of Health: regularly run consultations on high-level issues, seeking input from patients, staff, voluntary groups and the wider public.
    Screenshot of Department of Health Citizen Space
  4. HSCIC (Health and Social Care Information Centre): detailed and often fairly technical surveys, including consulting CSUs, CCGs and local authorities, running framework reviews and managing data collection exercises.
    Screenshot of consultation run on HSCIC's Citizen Space
  5. Stockport CCG: another local CCG making excellent use of Citizen Space’s flexibility to improve access and hear from more patients and service users. They regularly run online public surveys on issues like patient confidentiality, and have also experimented with things like taking iPads into GP surgeries to consult with patients directly.
    Screenshot from Stockport CCG's Citizen Space

Organisations like these choose to use Citizen Space for their health policy consultations because it’s a robust system that’s also easy to use. When the Department of Health ran an independent investigation into ways to make its digital activity more effective, one of the report’s recommendations was to make more use of Citizen Space. And customers tell us things like: ‘with Citizen Space we can do more consultations with less staff, and reach out to more and more people’. We hope that can be the case for an increasing number of public healthcare bodies.

You can see the consultations mentioned above, and literally thousands more, on the Citizen Space aggregator.

If you’d like to see more of Citizen Space and understand how it could be used in your organisation, contact us to arrange a demo.