Dr. Blacksher explains democratic deliberation in this video.

More recently, a participatory process called democratic deliberation – also known as public deliberation – has recently taken root in the US health sector. Deliberative engagement has been increasingly used over the past two decades to bring informed public perspectives into policy debates about, for example, health reform, resource allocation, pandemic planning, biotechnology, and genomic research.

Although there is no consensus on the definition of deliberative engagement, in general “public deliberation engages ordinary citizens with diverse perspectives in reasoned and respectful discussion about important social issues in search of well-informed proposals that deliberators will view as legitimate” (Blacksher E, et al. 2012; see also Burkhalter et al. 2010). A controlled trial of deliberative methods conducted by the Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality showed that deliberation increases knowledge among diverse participants, impacts deliberants’ reasoning, and is valued by participants, particularly members of racial and ethnic minority groups and those with lower levels of education (Carman KL, et al. 2015, Wang G, et al. 2015).

In September 2021, using the tools of civic engagement and population health science, the Center initiated the first stage of a new initiative:

During Spring and Summer 2021, Dr. Blacksher served on a National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) committee to plan a workshop held on June 14-15 titled, “Civic Engagement and Civic Infrastructure to Advance Health Equity.” With some 500 people participating, the workshop explored the relationships between civic and political engagement and health.
Dr. Blacksher worked with her colleagues to design the workshop’s concluding activity, a “mini-deliberation” in which a subset of participants weighed in on the question: “Which civic infrastructure investments are most important to advance health equity?”

Dr. Blacksher also gave several talks this Spring on democratic deliberation, for example, speaking about the imperative of meaningful public participation in pandemic planning and response for the National Hispanic Council on Aging, and about deliberative methodology to the Stakeholder Engagement Workgroup of the NIH-funded Clinical Sequencing and Evidence Generating Research Consortium about using democratic deliberative engagement for dissemination planning.

During Fall 2020 and Winter 2021, Dr. Blacksher was involved in a series of five online public deliberations about the equitable distribution of Covid-19 vaccines—a collaboration between the New York Academy of Medicine and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene that sought informed input from a cross-section of New Yorkers regarding which types of essential worker occupations should gain priority for vaccination. Dr. Blacksher developed and delivered an expert presentation on various ways to think about distributive fairness.

Dr. Blacksher gained firsthand experience in public participation at the Center for Practical Bioethics between 1998 and 2002, where she was the Deputy Director of an $11 million Robert Wood Johnson Foundation project, Community-State Partnerships to Improve End-of-Life Care. She worked closely with then Center CEO and the project’s Director, Myra Christopher, to provide technical assistance to 21 statewide coalitions seeking to build civic and policy environments supportive of good end-of-life care. She looks forward to expanding on the Center’s 35-year history of community-engaged bioethics with her expertise in civic engagement and democratic deliberation.