People's Panel for Wellbeing 2022 and Beyond: process and learning evaluation

1. Introduction

In January 2022, Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for COVID-19 Recovery signed off on the creation of a COVID-19 People’s Panel to ‘to collect and deliver in-depth information on lived experiences of behaviour and attitudes toward the pandemic and the Scottish Government’s response’. The impetus came from the need to supplement existing quantitative data with more in-depth evidence that comes from qualitative data. The idea was that the Panel would serve as a starting point for learning how to work in this way, and offer some examples of the value of this approach. Utilising the existing skills of the social researchers in the Central Analytical Division (CAD) the team were able to get something up and running relatively quickly. There were 29 people who were subsequently recruited to take part in six online meetings between June 2022 and March 2023 to discuss and offer their insights on a series of themes around COVID-19 recovery, prevention and protective measures. The panel was later renamed ‘The People’s Panel for Wellbeing’ to reflect a focus on wider issues, including the Cost of Living Crisis, NHS pressures, community resilience and planning for emergencies.

This research was commissioned by the Scottish Government in February 2023 to deliver some preliminary insights into the People’s Panel process to address the following research aims (RAs):

RA1. To provide a descriptive account of how the panel worked, its aims and design, the resources, roles, and people who were involved

RA2. To assess the quality of the impact of the panel on policy process, panel members, and the impact of the panel as a step towards more participatory approaches

RA3. To provide suggestions on how a People’s Panel with a wider remit could improve on this model in the future

The following section of this report (section 2) will cover the methods used to generate and analyse the data. Section 3 will offer a descriptive account of the People’s Panel in terms of the overall rationale, approach and summary of the timeline of key events. Section 4 will set out the key findings of the research related to the impacts of the panel on the members and on policy processes, the different perspectives on the role of the panel and the challenges and opportunities for the future of the people’s panel. The final section of the report will offer some recommendations for the ways that this model of research could be used, and improved, in the future.