IPPOSI, The Irish Platform for Patient Organisations, Science and Industry, established a Citizens' Jury to deliberate on the issue of access to health information and to decide on a set of recommendations to be presented to policymakers.
A team from FuJo, led by Professor Jane Suiter was contracted to provide an evaluation of the deliberative quality of the jury process.
The independent evaluation report found that the IPPOSI Citizens’ Jury was able to generate recommendations which can inform policymakers. The report outlines the ways in which the jury process has been designed to facilitate deliberative democracy, providing credibility to the verdicts reached by the jury.
The design of the jury considered representativeness, bias, oversight and a broad range of partial and impartial witnesses while the self-reports from jurors indicate that overall, they experienced knowledge gains and attitude change as a result of their participation. Additionally, the feedback reported from jurors about the quality of deliberation was consistently high.
The IPPOSI Citizens’ Jury has successfully laid the groundwork as a pilot for future Citizens’ Juries, with the opportunity to incorporate the lessons learned to further strengthen the process in future iterations.
The full report is available here.
