Table 2.

 Participants’ comments on the process

On consulting the public

‘My opinion on consulting with the public: It’s about time!’ ‘Following our participation in the Parliament, we came to realize and appreciate the difficult ethical and moral problems the healthcare system faces, and to understand why the heads of the system thought it appropriate to bring these problems to public consultation’.

On the elicitation of views on healthcare policy issues

‘Until I was in the Health Parliament I didn’t have detailed information about the healthcare system, and the information I was exposed to here helps me express my opinion about the issues’ ‘I never gave importance to the issues of private pay and equity in medicine…Suddenly complex topics have been exposed to me on such weighty problems’

On learning about the health policy issues and their complexity

‘When we came, we did not know where we were going, and when we started discussing the issues we saw we knew very little. But our knowledge got wider. I also liked very much the help we got from the professional advisors. They always had answers but the answers were not one‐sided. They would say: ‘also on this issue there is a debate, also on this there is no definite answer’. It gave me a feeling that there wasn’t any feeling of superiority or distance from the advisors. They were there to follow with us the discussion. We could tell they themselves were in a quandary’.

On acquiring a wider perspective

‘When my wife was ill, of course it appeared to me it would be important to give all that is possible to her: Whoever is ill should be given the treatment they need. That is from an absolute moral view. But then, you see the larger picture…and that influences you’. ‘It was interesting to learn a topic that each of us usually encounters only through our own health problems and to suddenly see it open up into a wider public issue’.