My ‘Brains at the Bevy’ talk -By Carl Walker

Having been invited to do a ‘Brains at the Bevy’ talk as part of the CUPP series, I had an option to shape it around a number of pieces of research that I was currently working on. However our work on the Brighton Citizens Health Services Survey seemed to fit the bill particularly neatly, not least because it spoke to concrete things that were being experienced by the people of Brighton & Hove. I arrived at the Bevy on a foul night of driving rain, quite unsure what to expect. A small but perfectly formed crowd had braved the rain to hear me. Warned in advance about my incapacity to maintain a civil tongue, Juliet from CUPP set up a swear box in the hope of taming such poor form.

And so the talk began. I spoke about the Brighton Citizen’s Health Survey (BCHSS), a project conceived by academics and students at the University of Brighton, in partnership with local community organisations and academics from the University of Surrey and The University of Essex. It was initially developed to bring the voices of the people of Brighton and Hove to important topical health issues like funding cuts, privatisation and the broader link between local commissioners and national funding policy directives. It is based on a city-wide survey of people’s reactions to controversial topics in local NHS commissioning and funding. During the design phase, it soon became clear from the reactions of others to my survey that it was

a.    Not a very good survey

b.    Not really a survey

Indeed a friend had sent me the following question that Marx had put on his 1880 questionnaire of worker’s rights-

“Can workers go on strike? Or are they only permitted to be the humble servants of their masters?” 

I think he might have been trying to tell me, through the medium of Karl Marx metaphor, that my questions were slightly leading. Anyway that instrument went through several revisions before I had a eureka moment (the length of time that it took to have this eureka moment suggests that my presence at ‘Brains at the Bevy’ could have been challenged under the Trades Descriptions Act). My Archimedic revelation was that you can only survey people on the things they actually know and so we quickly realized that our ‘survey’ was a distinctive approach to survey design in that it was more aligned to public consultation, participation and deliberation than the production of a validated instrument. Indeed such a methodology has enabled it to evolve as part of a participatory, consultative process which seeks to bring influence to bear on the practices of commissioning and funding of local health services.

Using the Freedom of Information facility, local commissioning controversies and public concerns as a starting point, the survey was designed as both a means of disseminating knowledge of, and recording responses to, significant local NHS privatisations and cuts.  I talked about how it sought to use a University as a ‘claimed space’ of engagement that mobilised our higher education remit for public education and deliberation in order to explore and, if relevant, speak to the democratic deficits inherent in austerity politics and NHS privatisation.

We had an excellent discussion on what was happening around the city and the implications of undertaking potentially controversial research in the current context where REF-instrumentalism is sweeping across our marketis(ing) higher education sector. At the end I proudly announced that I hadn’t sworn once upon which I was corrected by an unknown swear-word counter who confirmed that the total was actually 3.

 

Link to the next survey-

https://brighton.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/brighton-citizens-health-services-survey-no-2  

 

Further information on the project- http://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/bchss/