Living Dialogue on Health and Care
Working Paper:Pilot Study Report
Author: Wynne Grossman, MSW , William Rudman, PhD , Anthony L. Suchman, MD , Chris Ann Rodgers Arthur, PhD , Heather Wood Ion, B.Litt
The Valeo Initiative
Corte Madera, CA United States
06/30/2002
Pages: 22
Annotation: The Living Dialogue Pilot Study Report documents the efforts of the Valeo Initiative to conduct the discovery phase of an AI process to uncover how the American people view good health; what constitutes good health care; and what decisions people are already making to keep themselves and their families as healthy as possible.
The Valeo Initiative is a coalition of people and organizations, founded in 1999, with a vision of creating an epidemic of health.
The Living Dialogue on Health and Care was designed by a working group of Valeo members, advised by David Cooperrider. The key component of the Living Dialogue is a half-day workshop. The workshops were designed to enable between 8 -30 participants to explore their values about health and care, as well as identify opportunities they can take individually and collectively to improve their health, the care they receive, and the health of their community.
Members of the Valeo Initiative wanted to create a process for involving thousands of people in Living Dialogue on Health and Care workshops including people of all ages, races, economic status and regions of the country. They also wished to include both consumers and health care professionals. Since this was such an ambitious project, the Board felt it was necessary to include a pilot phase, testing concepts and materials in a wide variety of settings.
The Pilot Phase, which started in the Spring of 2001 and was completed in January 2002, consisted of:
· Developing the materials for a four hour Living Dialogue Workshop, including a step-by-step Facilitator's Guide, a participant's workbook (Storytellers Workbook,) and take home material (Starter Kit)
· Testing the Workshop in 11 varied settings.
· Analyzing data collected in all workshops
The objectives of the pilot phase were to test the:
· Use of the workshops with diverse populations
· Effectiveness of the questions
· Ease of facilitation
· Data collection instruments
· Usefulness of data mining as a means of analyzing the data
Valeo members from 11 communities, ten in the U. S. and one in England, volunteered to host pilot workshops. Between June 2001 and January 2002 approximately 230 people participated. These participants included: all age groups from teenagers to seniors, health care professionals and health care consumers, and the chronically ill in addition to a generally well population. Although the workshops were designed for four hours, two of the workshops were shortened to three hours.
Typically, the AI process does not include a rigorous data analysis component. The Living Dialogue, however, had the dual purpose of serving as the initial stage of the AI process and also serving as a data gathering process in which the information could be used by other groups to influence decisions about the design and provision of health and care services and benefits. This presented Valeo with some problems not typically encountered by AI practitioners.
To assist with the data capture and analysis, Valeo members enlisted William Rudman, PhD, associate professor, Health Information Management, School of Health Related Professions, University of Mississippi Medical Center. Dr. Rudman, who specializes in qualitative research, volunteered to conduct the data analysis for the pilot workshops.
Because much of the data was essentially stories and the rest (the small group work) was essentially focus group work, Dr. Rudman felt that he needed to use multiple methods of analysis-- data mining, traditional hypothesis testing statistical analysis, and qualitative analytic methods to interpret data. The results of this analysis are included in the findings section.
Online Resources:
Valeo Initiative
Living Dialogue Facilitators Guide
Resource Files:
Living Dialogue on Health and Care (doc )
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