Norfolk Citizens Panel

Background/Rationale

Norfolk Citizens' Panel is a group of local people who are surveyed several times a year by organisations wanting to hear their views.

Over 7,000 Norfolk people sit on the Citizens’ Panel, which makes it one of the largest panels in the country. Nine local organisations work together to run the Panel and use it to help them improve their services including Norfolk County Council, district councils and Norfolk Constabulary.

The members of the Citizens Panel are chosen to broadly reflect the demographic make-up of Norfolk. The panel members are refreshed at frequent intervals to ensure that there is no ‘questionnaire fatigue’. We recognise that although the Norfolk Citizens’ Panel gives us a very good feel for what Norfolk people as a whole think about local issues, however, there are some groups of people that the panel can’t reach. For example, the Panel is not the right way to find out what homeless people, young people or people with learning difficulties think. NHS Norfolk uses a number of different and innovative methods of engaging with the ‘seldom heard’ groups.

Membership of the panel is managed through the research partner and, as part of the contract; they must ensure that the membership is broadly representative of the demographic population.

A number of recruitment methods are used to ensure this. In the recent refreshment of the panel we looked at not just the demographic make up of the panel but also the geographical spread of members to ensure we reflected the rural/urban split of the county.

The panel uses questionnaires, in both paper and electronic formats, as a means of gauging the views of the panel members. The questionnaires are sent out in ‘waves’ and each partner have a set number of pages within the questionnaire. There are currently three ‘waves’ each year.