McMaster Health Forum | Stakeholder Dialogues

Our stakeholder dialogues provide an opportunity for 18-22 key doers and thinkers, drawn from those who will be involved with or affected by decisions about the issue at hand, to deliberate a problem and its causes, options for addressing it, and key implementation considerations. Dialogue participants are informed by a pre-circulated evidence brief and bring their tacit knowledge and real-world views and experiences to bear during the deliberations. The insights arising from the collective problem-solving are captured in a dialogue summary which, following the Chatham House rule, does not attribute comments to individuals. For every dialogue we’ve convened, a topic overview, the evidence brief, the dialogue summary and video interviews with dialogue participants can be found through our products page.

Increasingly, we convene one to three citizen panels in advance of each dialogue and capture the insights in a panel summary, the key messages of which are included in the evidence brief that informs the stakeholder dialogue. This approach allows the values of a diverse group of citizens, with different types of lived experience with the issue at hand, to inform the stakeholder dialogue.

While we convene stakeholder dialogues across Canada and internationally, those held locally take place in our DialogueSpace, which was purpose-built to support this type of collective problem-solving. The Forum recognizes and acknowledges that we convene our stakeholder dialogues on the traditional territories of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee nations, and within the lands protected by the ‘Dish With One Spoon’ wampum agreement.

If you are a health-system leader (a policymaker or stakeholder), you can:

• check to see if your topic of interest has been directly addressed recently;
• if so, download the topic overview, evidence brief and dialogue summary and view the video interviews; and
• if your topic has not been directly addressed recently, email us at forum@mcmaster.ca to discuss how we can help.

We’ll soon be complementing our stakeholder dialogues with proactive efforts to build, support and spark action among communities of practice on the topics we address in our dialogues.