The impacts of a Community Jury on participants’ health interactions and decision between 1 and 5 years after the experience.

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Community/Citizens’ Juries (CJs) are a form of deliberative democracy which endeavour to elicit informed perspectives and recommendations from community members, on topics often viewed as controversial or with a level of expert uncertainty around the balance of benefits and harms to the community (Carson et al, 2003; Solomon & Abelson, 2012). CJs typically include: several days of expert information provision, opportunities to question the experts, and deliberation with a facilitator and again in private to arrive at an informed decision/recommendation for a stakeholder group. CJs have been used by various levels of government (Australian Institute of Health Policy Studies, 2006; Health Canada Policy Toolkit, 2000) to inform policy decisions and in research to explore community preferences to health related controversies. CJs do not intend to change an individual’s thought or behaviours but rather, to elicit perspectives once individuals are objectively informed of the controversies or difficulties surrounding the issue. However, exposure to expert information and presentations and the act of deliberative exposure to the considered views of others, has the potential to influence participants’ decision making beyond the CJ experience. Exposure to CJs may increase specific knowledge about focussed topics. In our previous CJs we have demonstrated an increased knowledge in information about PSA testing for prostate cancer (Thomas et al, 2014) and dementia (Thomas et al, 2018). However, dissemination of knowledge, is not synonymous with knowledge utilisation. Utilisation requires application of learnt information, and dissemination alone is often insufficient to produce change (Farkas et al., 2003). The information and knowledge gained whilst participating in a CJ has the potential to impact juror’s views and behaviours after the jury concludes, e.g. jurors sharing the information learned during the CJ with others (family members and friends), impacting how jurors view scientific information and medical uncertainty, and affecting how they interact with their healthcare providers. This project aims to identify whether any impacts of participating in a CJ occurred for previous participants and if so, what is the nature of those changes/effects.

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