Consumer Conversations Guidelines

Event etiquette

Please introduce yourself in the chat if you are able to.

You are welcome to keep your camera off if you prefer, and no one is under any obligation to speak if they don’t wish to.

To keep the meeting manageable, please keep your microphone on mute unless you are speaking.

Our coordinator will try to respond to chat as soon as she can but may not keep up so thank you for being patient.

Please raise your hand if you would like to speak. You can do that by either physically raising your hand, or by using the raise your hand button down the bottom of your screen on desktop or mobile devices. For those on a keyboard, you can use

• Alt+Y keyboard shortcut
• or Option+Y on a Mac 

If you are joining us by phone only option, we will do our best to ask for responses from those of you on the phone as we can’t visually see that you’d like to ask a question.  If we do overlook those of you phoning in, please speak up.

Sharing information confidentially

We record these sessions so they can be shared with staff in Queensland Health, including Strategic Communications Branch and engagement advisors from the Hospital and Health Services. We’d like to share some direct quotes as well as it adds more impact. Quotes are always de-identified as much as possible, by removing the speakers name and any other details. Please contact us if you say something you would rather we don’t share in our reports.

Creating a safe and welcoming environment

The purpose of these consumer conversations is to hear from consumers and carers across the state. We want to create a safe forum for consumers to provide feedback, raise issues of concern and identify gaps they see. Health Consumers Queensland respects the rights of consumers and carers to make informed decisions about their healthcare and we don’t expect to hear a consensus among consumers all of the time.

Respect

We would also like to hear a diversity of views, some of which you may not share. But we ask everybody to be respectful of each other during the sessions, including in the chat thread.

Our limitations

There are many issues coming up around COVID-19 and we are not able to solve them all. We do our best to keep communication with consumers open so that we can see what the biggest issues are, and put our energy into those.

Not everyone will get the chance to speak in a session. If you do get the opportunity to speak, please limit yourself to just the one point, and try to keep it as brief as possible so others are able to have a turn.  Feel free to use the chat to share your thoughts as well.

The job of a facilitator is to keep the conversation on topic, so if you wander away from that then the facilitator will respectfully step in to bring it back to the question at hand.