Lay perceptions of the desired role and type of user involvement in clinical governance.

Objective: The aim of this paper is to explore variations in lay perceptions of user involvement in clinical governance.

Context: The English National Health Service has sought to build a dependable health service through enhanced effectiveness, responsiveness and consistency. Clinical governance, a policy for improving service quality, is a key pillar of these reforms. It is a statutory duty of primary care organizations to ensure that users are involved in all service planning and decision making, including clinical governance. Yet surveys indicated that user involvement in clinical governance was underdeveloped and underutilized.

Design: Focus groups were conducted with different types of lay people to explore their perceptions around public involvement in different aspects of clinical governance policy.

Results: Content analysis of the transcripts reveals that different groups of lay people varied in their desired role perspective and preferred type of involvement in different aspects of clinical governance policy. Drawing upon existing models of user involvement, we identified three role perspectives that lay people could take in user involvement - consumer, advocate and citizen. We compared our findings regarding the desired type of involvement with existing models of user involvement, and identified a new type of involvement, overseeing, that is relevant to clinical governance policy.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that to facilitate user involvement in clinical governance, it would be necessary to use different strategies to accommodate the differing role perspectives and types of involvement desired by different groups of lay people.