Learning new knowledge and helping others were motivating for Cathy
Transcript
Certainly, as I said before, feeling that your opinion matters, that you are contributing to better health for your friends and neighbours and strangers. The facilitators make sure if you’re on a teleconference that everybody is heard. At first you’ll say “It’s Cathy, and I’m wondering about on page three, I noticed such and such”. If you don’t identify yourself and weigh in regularly, the facilitator will say “Cathy, what do you think about that?” Or “Michele, is that how you feel too?” So you can’t really sit back and say nothing, but at the same time, everybody’s quite respectful. But it’s the facilitators who make sure that the conversation sort of stays on track and then wraps it up nicely at the end. If people sometimes get carried away with personal stories, they’ll sort of redirect the conversation, so that’s very good.
As for barriers, really the only thing is the time. If you’re willing to spend time and my experience with these projects has been that when they say your teleconference is an hour, it’s probably 59 to 61 minutes. It’s not an hour and a half. Again, that’s a facilitator’s skill that keeps everything on track and you’re done and you walk away feeling that you’ve made a difference. So I haven’t found there to be any barriers, but again I like doing that sort of thing. I like participating.
Interviewer: What would you say keeps you engaged in the process?
Probably learning new things, experiencing information and opportunities that I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t been involved and that most people wouldn’t even know about. Now, you do sign a confidentiality agreement when you do any of these, so you can’t talk about the specific project or the outcomes. Once they’re made public, then the Canadian Task Force on Preventative HealthCare has a website and all of them are –okay, that’s how I knew how many topics were covered, so it’s heart related and cancer and other things. Their focus of course is prevention, but also early detection. So I wouldn’t know about some of those things if I hadn’t and it just feeds my interest in medical knowledge and medical progress over the years.
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