Public participation in health and COVID-19 in Portugal

Abstract

In the last decades, public participation in decision-making processes has been an ongoing theme, assuming more or less centrality, within the political agendas in several democratic contexts around the world. In the health domain, public participation has been considered a political strategy with the potential of ensuring greater co-responsibility among the actors involved, as well as to increase health services’ transparency, thus being emphasized as one of the best practices that should be implemented towards the quality of decisions, especially those oriented to the real health problems of the populations. The COVID-19 pandemic brought additional pressures to health systems, constituting itself as a conducive context to the analysis of citizen participation in health decision-making processes. This essay presents an exploratory analysis on the evolution of citizen participation practices in health policies in Portugal, highlighting some of its current and future challenges. The present analysis aims to understand how the pandemic resonated in the way in which participation in the health domain had been carried out in the country, assessing whether, in a singular global period of crisis, the pandemic as a collective problem expanded or contracted these participatory practices.

Risk communication and community engagement with vulnerable groups: Perceptions of social-services CSOs during Covid-19

“…day-care centers, schools, open spaces from CSO's such as Cafés or community spaces, libraries) was severely restricted, two aspects which are important especially to engage with more vulnerable groups such as socioeconomically deprived people or people with mental health problems [ [16] , [17] , [18] ]. Second, Covid-19 was an opportunity for new ways of community engagement for health, such as for example digital community engagement or an increased role of citizens in municipal health councils [ [19] , [20] , [21] , [22] ].…”