Health Care Consumers

I don't know about anyone else, but as someone who is and has been a health care consumer, I have found it useful to get in touch with organisations in my immediate surrounds that represent ME to the various health authorities.

Alone, I suspect that I can do very little to influence the way in which these large and somewhat cumbersome bureaucracies work and yet my experiences, especially when added to the experiences of others like me may actually have an impact on how services are designed and delivered.

To this end, I joined a Health Care Consumer representative organisation and actually managed to go to the next step and get myself trained as a Consumer Representative and then go even one step further and actually represent consumers with the local department of health at an ongoing forum where they were discussing one of the ways that services were to be delivered.

During my stint in this position I was continually wondering how it could be possible to increase the level of communication that I had with my 'constituents' i.e. people who were also consumers of the services so that I could tap into their knowledge and experiences and then be in a position to better represent us all.

My first thought was to turn to some of the people who actually saw and assisted these people - for example psychologists, social workers, doctors etc as they are in a position to see many more people than I could. Of course their points of view would be second hand and possibly tainted with their own "spin" on how their patients or clients could be assisted - a form of spin that might also be tainted with a little personal perspective on how any changes to service delivery was likely to affect their own service provision.

In other words this was not necessarily a useful idea.

The use that our politicians are making of the Internet has provided me with a new wrinkle on communications.

Political candidates are now using this new form of media as a way of reaching groups of people who previously could only be reached through letter drops or pamphlets.

What has become evident is that the need to communicate may well be part of a more global problem and solution that has manifested itself in our society.

Computers and their parts are still relatively expensive - not only to purchase, but also to connect to the Internet, maintain, use and recycle.

Existing in most communities these days are organisations that actually take old and unwanted computers - working or not and spend time and effort recycling them, refurbishing where possible and then making them available to people on low incomes as a way of enabling them to get with the computer revolution and join in on the communications media of the 21st century.

So I have asked myself whether it would be possible to use a site on the web as a way of reaching out to health care consumers and enabling them to communicate with each other and with their representatives so that they can share their stories and so develop some interactive ways of enabling themselves to have a say in how future services are to be delivered.

It's something that needs to be explored and I wonder if any of my readers have any suggestions that they would like to make on how to get this going?