Abstract
People participation concerning health issue in constitution writing:A case study in Khon Kean Province Common people in Thailand in the past had never been involved in writing the Constitution.In 1997,it was the first time in the Thai history that people werw encouraged to participate the process of writing the latest constitution. The study of people participation in constitutional writing was therefore implemented using action researth approach. The study aimed at documanting the process of people involvement in expressing their opinion in the process of drafting the constitution as well as the public hearing of the constitution. In addition the project also conducted number of group discussion in order to stimulate public interest and collect people’s option and needs in various aspects including the health and medical care. The project started the implementation by organizing a working committee who became educated about the constitutional writing process. The committee menber helped organize 13 discussion group, which involved 146 people from various occuppation including disable people. Opinion from group discussion were collected, synthesized and extended to the constitutional group which involed 232 people, some were in the same discussion group before. To gater wider rang of public opintion project thin launched 7,000 concise questionnaires to people Of 18 year or more throughtout province and got more than 70 percent reponses. The research results indicated that people in Khon Kaen province had show their interest and were willing to share their opinion on the constitutional writing. However, threr were no existing socail mechanism to facilitate people involvement in public event within such a short time span since the public hearing hed to be done within two months. Under time constraint, most core groups in the province therefore organized one day seminar in order to get more number of participants but this method could not facilitate people interaction and indepth information gathering. On the other hand, group discuss could fill the gap of big seminar menthod, it was time consuming and required number of volunteers to facilitate the group discussion and budget management. The use of concise questionnaires was found to be effective method to gather public consensus.
