Council’s survey on Hub – will it give a true picture of opinion?

Dacorum Council is using a survey to seek views on the proposed Market Square Health Campus or Hub.

The survey has some features which make it unreliable as a guide to the true state of opinion:

• There is no reference to any alternatives to establishing the Campus on the Market Square. Treasury rules state that, to get the money for the project, the local NHS will have to consider ‘a wide range of possible options’. The next stage in the project, the Strategic  Outline Case, MUST have a section on ‘Making the case for change’. That means that keeping the Hospital where it is must be one of the alternatives. That key information is being kept from the public during this engagement.
• Some key questions about the benefits of the Campus/Hub are set out in a (frankly weird) way which favours acceptance of the concept. The survey sets out various features of the Hub and asks the respondent for the level of agreement. But in the box which would normally indicate strong disagreement there is, bizarrely, only the meaningless ‘Strongly’. Perhaps a formatting error?
• It appears that multiple responses can be made from the same device. This suggests that the same person could respond many times (unless they are filtered out at a later stage). For comparison, the Dacorum Health Action Group survey, which does set out alternative options, does NOT allow such multiple responses.

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