Since November 2016, our Citizens' Panel has brought together people across Scotland to inform and influence key decisions about health and social care policy and services.

A citizens' panel is a large, demographically-representative group of citizens which helps to assess public preferences and opinions. This is the first time a national citizens' panel focusing on health and social care issues has been established in Scotland.

Our Citizens' Panel was developed at a size that will allow statistically robust analysis of the views of its members at a Scotland-wide level, roughly 1,300 people from across all 32 local authority areas. Panel members were selected at random from the electoral register or recruited to be broadly representative of the Scottish population by gender, age, employment status, housing tenure, ethnic origin and geographic location. More information about how members were recruited can be found in the Citizens' Panel recruitment report.

Panel members share their opinions using self-complete electronic or postal surveys or through telephone interviews.

We work with a range of organisations to develop questions for the Panel, including Scottish Government and the third sector, and report on how they use the findings from the Panel to inform their work.