The Public Engagement Project on Community Control Measures for Pandemic Influenza Findings and Recommendations from Citizen and Stakeholder Deliberation Days

The Public Engagement Project On Community Control Measures for Pandemic Influenza was carried out in October and November 2006 to engage the public in discussions and deliberations about the economic and social tradeoffs associated with community control measures to slow the spread of the disease. The project was sponsored by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) and The Keystone Center, serving as a third party neutral facilitator. Fourteen other organizations participated, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). To conduct this public engagement, the sponsors made use made use of the Policy Analysis CollaborativE (PACE), an innovative model for engaging both the organized stakeholder public and the general public made up of citizens-at-large (see http://www.keystone.org/spp/health-pandemic.html). Two to three representatives from the organized stakeholder public were chosen from approximately ten major sectors likely to be affected by the control measures (e.g. education sector), to form a 50 member national level panel. To outreach to the larger public, a sample of approximately 260 citizens from the general public representative by age, race, and sex were recruited from each of the four principal geographic regions of the United States and included citizens in Seattle, Washington; Syracuse, New York; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Atlanta, Georgia. The group processes were structured to provide essential information to the participants, to encourage the diverse participants to engage in discussions with each other in small groups, to weigh tradeoffs, and to reach a collective viewpoint on whether or not U.S. jurisdictions should implement a package of five community level control measures (see table 2, page 13). In addition, participants were asked to identify the anticipated challenges in implementing such control measures, and what solutions might be possible for these challenges