Public participation in health and COVID-19 in Portugal

Abstract

In the last decades, public participation in decision-making processes has been an ongoing
theme, assuming more or less centrality, within the political agendas in several democratic contexts around
the world. In the health domain, public participation has been considered a political strategy with the
potential of ensuring greater co-responsibility among the actors involved, as well as to increase health
services’ transparency, thus being emphasized as one of the best practices that should be implemented
towards the quality of decisions, especially those oriented to the real health problems of the populations.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought additional pressures to health systems, constituting itself as a conducive
context to the analysis of citizen participation in health decision-making  rocesses. This essay presents an exploratory  a nalysis on the evolution of citizen  articipation practices in health policies in Portugal, highlighting some of its  current and future challenges. The  present analysis aims to understand how  the pandemic resonated in the way in which  participation in the health domain  had been carried out in the country,  assessing whether, in a singular global  period of crisis, the pandemic as a collective problem expanded or contracted these  participatory practices.