Governance and public involvement in the British National Health Service: Understanding difficulties and developments

Abstract

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Patient involvement in a scientific advisory process: Setting the research agenda for medical products

“…Based on the results as presented above, the participants' willingness to participate and the positive feedback from participants and the GR committee, we could argue that, patients and patient representatives were capable and willing to provide the needed input. Although experiential knowledge is often seen as less valuable than scientific knowledge [12,58,59], the GR committee was open-minded towards this 'participatory experiment'. The fact that several GR committee and staff members attended focus groups led to firsthand insight into the added value of patients' experiential knowledge.…”

Expectations and Obligations: Professionalism and Medicine’s Social Contract with Society

“…Physicians and medicine relate to each societal component.The primary relationship of the individual physician in both moral and fiduciary terms is with the individual patient (May 1975;Pellegrino 1990;Rosenbaum 2003;Rosenblatt, Shaw, and Rosenbaum 1997).This relationship cannot be isolated from the system within which it operates, nor from the wishes of society as a whole. Other health professionals and their organizations, disease-oriented and consumer groups, industry, individual citizens, and the unorganized general public are all partners to the contract (Brown et al 2004;Blumenthal 2006;Callaghan and Wistow 2006;Ham and Alberti 2002;Morone and Kilbreth 2002;Rosen and Dewar 2004;Salter 2001Salter , 2003.As within the medical profession, there is a dynamic interplay between the various nongovernmental stakeholders as they interact with each other, which results in the elaboration of what patients and the public wish from physicians and their organizations (Le Grand 2003).…”

Patient-expert partnerships in research: how to stimulate inclusion of patient perspectives

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