Community Jury: Case finding for dementia, what do community members think General Practitioners (GPs) should do?

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Government policy on health care should seek to reflect the views of the community but current methods for community engagement are limited. Strategies such as opinion polling, community forums, and engaging consumer representatives on decision making panels may not be able to fully consider issues that are complex, require a greater understanding of potential benefits and harms, and may provide only a limited number of viewpoints from the community. A community jury is a deliberative process that can help to establish the community’s preferences and values on a particular topic. This research team has successfully conducted the first randomised controlled trial of a community jury process in health and demonstrated proof of concept that this form of public engagement could be potentially beneficial to health policy. Our findings demonstrated a community jury was capable of considering complex information on the harms and benefits of screening, and to distinguish individual from community choices. Our community jury also identified an innovative solution to the question being deliberated. Cognitive impairment ranges from mild impairment to severe dementia. It causes problems with memory, learning, and organising and mild cognitive impairment can be a precursor for dementia. The benefit evidence for case finding for dementia is scarce, the medication benefits not significant, and the nonpharmacological interventions mostly ineffective. We will conduct a community jury to consider the potential benefits and harms of case finding for dementia in primary care and ask the jury to propose a recommendation for the question, “Should the health system encourage GPs to practice ‘case finding’ of dementia in people over 50?”

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