Reaching Consensus with Care: The OurCare project and your recommendations to transform primary care in Nova Scotia
What’s the OurCare project?
OurCare is a national project to gather input from the public on how to reform primary healthcare in Canada. Its three stages include an online national survey, ‘Priorities Panels,’ and community roundtables, throughout which thousands of people living in Canada have shared their ideas, hopes, and priorities.
Priorities Panels were designed and hosted by project partner and deliberative process champions, MASS LBP, in five provinces: Nova Scotia, British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, and Manitoba. Each one offered the opportunity for residents to meet, learn about primary care, and write their own report about the changes to primary healthcare they believe their province needs.
Why was Engage Nova Scotia involved in the OurCare project?
Engage Nova Scotia (that’s us!) were invited by MASS LBP to be their local partner in this national project.
We said yes to this opportunity because we know that primary care is one of the things that matters most to Nova Scotians and it was an opportunity to hear from people like you about this topic. Plus, we got to learn from MASS LBP about their processes.
We said yes to this opportunity because we believe engaging Nova Scotians in solutions will lead to the best ones.
What was our role in the OurCare project?
You may remember seeing our call for people to volunteer for the ‘Priorities Panel’ in our newsletter and on our social media platforms, but our role in the OurCare project in Nova Scotia really took off once MASS LBP selected participants from the pool of volunteers. (And a huge thank you to everyone who volunteered!)
We shared the responsibilities of hosting and holding space for panel members’ conversations throughout two virtual engagement sessions and one full weekend (30 hours over three days).
We also worked alongside MASS LBP to engage one-on-one with panel members and ensure everyone felt prepared, supported, ready, and capable to fully take part.
Overall, it was an opportunity to be part of a process that explored how systems can work better for people, and how to capture and organize community members’ ideas and recommendations in a way that can be shared with leaders in health care and government. We’re curious about how to do this well because it’s something we believe the world needs more of. We followed an agenda and approach that MASS LBP designed and was consistently used in all five provinces. We helped to uphold the spirit of it, even though we didn’t create it.
What did panel members do and what recommendations to transform primary care in Nova Scotia did they decide on?
In Nova Scotia, 34 panel members heard from 16 experts and arrived at 25 recommendations. Their 25 specific recommendations address upstream and downstream issues within the following areas:
A public vision statement by the provincial government for accessible, timely, and equitable primary care.
Patient health data.
Sustainable care delivery models.
Education, recruitment, and retention of health care professionals.
Expansive primary care.
Public governance and system oversight.
An informed public.
All of the recommendations were developed based on the lived experiences of the people in the room, combined with several hours of learning from experts who helped to explain challenges, strengths, opportunities, and limitations of the current system.
Cover page for the Nova Scotia Priorities Panel on Primary Care
What’s our takeaway from being involved in the OurCare project?
In addition to the specific recommendations to transform primary care in Nova Scotia, we’re taking away what we observed of the process and its power to bridge increasing polarization across and within communities.
Panel members reflected a real mash up of people across Nova Scotia. That fact, in and of itself, contributed to peoples’ experience of being a panel member. The shared reflection from panel members that stood out to us was, “Look at how different our experiences are and look at what it was like to work closely and collaboratively. The world needs more of this today.”
Part of what helped the group reach consensus and “gel” their thinking into recommendations was how much they learned about primary care from experts. This foundation of facts was fuel for generative conversations. Having shared points of reference made group work, conversation, and deliberation easier.
The process served as proof for panel members that we can come together to work across differences effectively and reach consensus on recommendations for deeply nuanced and critically urgent challenges.
It served as a fresh and stark reminder for us of the undeniable power of bringing people together, and, in particular, what’s possible when we bring people who are different from one another together.
