All employees at Rigshospitalet have just received an invitation to enter the draw to become a member of Rigshospitalet’s deliberative Wellbeing Panel, which will decide how DKK 3.5 million will be used to improve wellbeing – across all employee groups.
Recent years of democratic innovation in municipalities with the use of deliberative citizen assemblies, where a stratified selected group of citizens are involved in joint decisions, are now moving into Denmark’s largest university hospital.
The 30 members out of a total of 12,000 employees will reflect Rigshospitalet’s breadth in terms of age, gender and function – so that doctors, nurses, cleaning staff, bioanalysts, HKs and all other professional groups working at Rigshospitalet get a chair on the panel.
Rigshospitalet is leading the way in several areas:
- The Wellbeing Panel will distribute DKK 3.5 million to initiatives and activities that maximize wellbeing for Rigshospitalet’s employees.
- The Well-being Panel has an unlimited decision-making mandate – in relation to the distribution of the DKK 3.5 million – and thus has not only an advisory function for the client (the company’s MED committee)
- Rigshospitalet builds on experiences from the Climate Assembly at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Copenhagen, which was the first Danish deliberative process in a Danish workplace.
- Together with the Wellbeing Panel, a Democracy Corps is created across Rigshospitalet to ensure long-term capacity building.
- The Wellbeing Panel lives up to the OECD deliberative principles
Panel work and methodology
Over the course of the wellbeing panel’s five sessions, members will come to a common prioritization of wellbeing resources. Along the way, members will learn about what supports good wellbeing in practice and hear about what other organizations have done to create good wellbeing. The aim is to reach a consensus across the panel’s opinions and priorities.
The panel gets inspiration from professionals along the way, but ultimately it is the panel that decides the distribution through dialog.
As the panel’s independent third-party secretariat, We Do Democracy will work closely with the organization to show how democratic renewal at one of the country’s leading workplaces can create better prioritization of company resources – by bringing more diverse voices and perspectives into play. For the benefit of Rigshospitalet and as inspiration for many other Danish workplaces that are interested in new democratic methods for how employees can be better involved in decisions and create greater value in practice.