The first UK National Screening Committee (UK NSC) stakeholder conference took place in December. This inaugural event was attended by 100 stakeholders and we were delighted with feedback. My colleague, Nick Johnstone-Waddell, has already blogged about the day and those of you who missed it can view presentations and videos from the day.
During the day we had a lot of information to get across to stakeholders, but just as importantly we wanted to engage with them, to get their views on what the committee does well, and to see if there were any areas which we could improve. Due to the number of attendees we had to think carefully about the best way to gather this information in a co-ordinated way. We decided to facilitate table top discussions in the afternoon which focused on 3 specific questions:
- Has this event been helpful in understanding the role of the UK NSC and improving stakeholder engagement?
- What does the UK NSC do well, presently, regarding stakeholder involvement?
- What practical steps could the UK NSC make to improve stakeholder involvement?
We had 10 tables. Each table was assigned someone to co-ordinate responses to the 3 questions. This also enabled stakeholders the chance to chat with one another, contribute actively and have a break from Power Point presentations!
The exercise went very well and we received a lot of feedback on all of the questions. We have since been able to analyse all responses and they are presented below:
Q1. Has this event been helpful in understanding the role of the UK NSC and improving stakeholder engagement? All responses to this question were positive and the specific points highlighted are displayed in the graph below. Participants at all tables agreed that they felt the day had helped them understand how the UK NSC worked, how decisions are made regarding screening programmes and how evidence is used.
Q2. What does the UK NSC do well, presently, regarding stakeholder involvement? We had lots of different responses to this question as summarised below:
Q3. What practical steps could the UK NSC make to improve stakeholder involvement? This was probably the most important question for us. We pledged on the day to listen to what stakeholders suggested and to act on the suggestions. The table below outlines suggestions for stakeholder improvement:
| Comment | Number of mentions |
| Make the stakeholder consultation process clearer | 4 |
| More accessible/clearer messaging to stakeholders | 4 |
| Have annual events like this/annual topics for conference/vary topics | 3 |
| Involve users (someone who has had a positive/false positive screen) in the conference presentations | 2 |
| Target more charities to attend annual conference | 2 |
| Monthly bulletins for Screening & Immunisation teams | 1 |
| Clarity on how to become a member of the UK NSC | 1 |
| Make the stakeholder consultation process longer | 1 |
The above findings have been circulated across the screening team and will be discussed at the next UK NSC meeting. Our information and evidence teams have already started to look at how to make the consultation process clearer and we will blog about that very soon.
Our blogs are proving to be hugely successful with over 1000 subscribers, so hopefully that is going someway to making our information to stakeholders clearer and more accessible.
We aim to keep on improving, so please do continue to tell us what you like and how you like it!
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