Planning and facilitating stakeholder engagement to inform the development of the Brisbane North Primary Health Network (PHN) Health Needs Assessment.
Situation Explained
Each PHN is required to undertake a Health Needs Assessment (HNA) to submit to the Commonwealth Government every three years. The HNA informs how a PHN responds to the health needs of their catchment.
Brisbane North PHN initially engaged Leisa Prowse Consulting to plan and facilitate an in-person Health Needs Assessment Stakeholder Event. This stakeholder engagement was intended to verify the prioritised needs discovered through earlier stages of the assessment, build a comprehensive understanding of these priorities, and generate high-level strategies to address these priorities.
Leisa Prowse Consulting worked with Brisbane North PHN to design a ¾ day in-person event. The engagement event was designed to cater for about 90 stakeholders from across the health care sector.
However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the potential impacts of the imminent re-opening of the Queensland border, it became clear that stakeholders were not able to attend a ¾ day in-person workshop.
To respond to this change, Leisa Prowse Consulting designed a new workshop structure which could be delivered online via Zoom. Given that Brisbane North PHN are well known for their hospitality at stakeholder events, pivoting to an online approach was a challenge. An additional challenge was the compressed timeframe in which the online workshops needed to be delivered.
Our Approach
Our team developed a new format for the HNA Stakeholder Event, which included an online pre-workshop briefing and a series of four three-hour online workshops. The pre-workshop briefing, and workshops were conducted over one week.
Each workshop focussed on a different prioritised need which had been identified in the earlier stages of the HNA. Each workshop was designed to develop potential solutions that could address the prioritised need through a series of questions that were discussed in small groups. Each small group had a facilitator and scribe.
Material to support the stakeholder workshops was hosted on Brisbane North PHN’s online engagement tool, My Voice.
Results
- The original in-person ¾ day Stakeholder Event was deconstructed and ‘pivoted’ into a series of online workshops in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Creative workshop design, which incorporated online visual note-taking and robust facilitation, ensured participants were providing a range of perspectives and contributing to the development of high-level strategies to address the identified health needs.
- The use of small group discussions provided a safe environment for intimate conversations about sensitive health issues, and encouraged connection between participants as the week progressed.