Public participation in health and Covid-19 in Portugal

Abstract

In the last decades, public participation in decision-making processes has been and ongoing theme, assuming more or less centrality, within the political agendas in several democratic contexts around the world. In the health domain, public participation has been considered a political strategy with the potential of ensuring greater co-responsibility among the actors involved, as well as to increase health services’ transparency. In this way, it has been emphasized as a best practice that should be implemented towards the quality of decisions, especially those oriented to the real health problems of the populations. The COVID-19 pandemic brought additional pressures to health systems, which constitutes itself as a conducive context to the analysis of citizen participation in health decision-making processes. This essay presents an exploratory analysis on the evolution of citizen’s participation practices in health policies in Portugal, highlighting some of its current and future challenges. The present analysis aims to understand how the pandemic had resonance in the way in which participation in the health domain had been carried out in the country, assessing whether, in a singular global period of crisis, the pandemic as a collective problem expanded or contracted these participatory practices.