Update on our Service User and Carer Involvement project

Stella and Syeda, Service User Involvement

By Stella Lam and Syeda Tahir

Hello everybody, hope you are all well.

In the last blog we talked about doing a Quality Improvement (QI) project on Service User and Carer Involvement. We have begun raising awareness of the QI programme by going out into the community to speak to people and promote opportunities to get involved e.g. tailored introductory sessions and training. The project is currently a pilot, focused on Tower Hamlets, with plans to use our learnings to launch similar involvement support in the other boroughs and directorates.

It has been really interesting to go out, meet and speak to the community. Not many are aware of the QI programme but we are confident we will change this soon! So far, we have held a stall at a borough wide mental wellbeing event – called Your Say, Your Day – where we heard Jonny Benjamin’s story. Benjamin was also our guest speaker at the ELFT AGM which we also attended. We have also been going to other mental health meetings in the borough. If you know of one that would be good for us to attend, please do drop us an email! We are happy to  talk about QI involvement, so please spread the word.

The QI Service User and Carer involvement project team have been amazing and every time we meet, plenty of ideas and offers of support are provided. We will be updating and developing our PDSA at the next meeting, and hope to come up with creative means of reaching the community.

We would also like to speak to QI teams that are looking to get service users/carers involved, to provide involvement information and share experiences with team members. Please get in touch with us if you would like an informal chat about this. A webpage on all things involvement has been created to answer commonly asked questions, please find it here

QI programme has been evaluated to check the progress made thus far and the outcome is available as podcast here.This was an opportunity for the team to share their learning and highlight successes and barriers they have encountered whilst delivering the QI programme. It is really good, not just because we are involved!

We have booked more outings in the next couple of months and hope to run in to some of you out there.  Take care in the meantime.