Final Report > Chapter 28: Public Involvement Through Empowerment > The issue

The issue

1 For a healthcare service to be truly patient-centred it must be infused with the views and values of the public (as patients past, present or future). The public must be involved. To be involved, the public must be empowered in the sense in which the word is used in the evidence of the NHS Primary Care Group Alliance. It suggested that public empowerment means: `a public that is sufficiently informed as to be able to formulate meaningful views about quality and direction in the planning and delivery of health care; which views are listened to and acted on by commissioners and providers of NHS health care at the core of their decision making.' [1] We gratefully adopt this view.

2 In Chapter 23 (Respect and Honesty), we considered the entitlement of individual patients to more and better information and a greater degree of involvement in their care and treatment. In this chapter, we take a wider view. Here we consider how to empower and involve patients and carers in improving the quality of healthcare services generally. We explore how to involve the public as citizens in decision-making about the NHS, their NHS. The problem, while simple to state remains intractable: it concerns how, in a modern democracy, a public service such as the NHS can have embedded within it not only the principle that it exists to serve the public, but also mechanisms to ensure that this aspiration is translated into reality.

Footnotes

[1] Seminar 7. The NHS Primary Care Group Alliance. Position Paper