Conference Abstracts

Evaluating deliberative public engagement from multiple perspectives: is it an effective methodology for genomic public policy development?

Caron Molster (1), Bev McNamara, Taryn Phillips, Ayla Potts, Peter O’Leary (1)

(1) Office of Population Health Genomics, Division of Public Health, Department of Health, Perth, Western Australia

Public health systems worldwide have expressed strategic commitments to foster and support consumer and community engagement in health system performance. For areas such as population health genomics, where the issues are often complex, ethically contentious and involve difficult choices or trade-offs among value-based options, innovative engagement methodologies have been proposed to obtain the underlying values and deliberated views of an informed citenzry.  While numerous rationales have been put forward to support the use of these methodologies, there is little empirical evidence of their effectiveness in contributing to the legitimate and substantive quality of public policy. There is a paucity of evaluative frameworks and few deliberative public engagements have been comprehensively evaluated from multiple perspectives. This presented an opportunity to develop and apply a framework for the multi-dimensional evaluation of recent deliberative engagement forums on biobanking in Western Australia. Perspectives represented in the framework include forum participants, policy decision-makers and the broader general community. Findings from this study will inform the future development and application of public engagement methodologies within population health genomics.

Presented at the Genes for Health Conference, May 2009