Please give two or three brief examples of how people have been involved in education at the School?
People have been involved in a number of ways:
In your experience, what makes it work well?
There are a number of things that make service user and carer involvement work well. The first thing is about establishing a group of people who can work together. As a network we learn from each other and support one another. As new people join the network, more established members are able to offer support and advice.
It is important that service users and carers have an identified person that they know they can come to for information about their involvement and about the university. We have an admin. worker who provides support to the network and has built up good relationships with those who are involved.
Making sure that people have adequate notice of sessions that are up and coming is also important as the majority of the members of the network have extremely busy lives and are booked up well in advance! Members of the network also appreciate feedback in terms of what students liked or disliked about their input.
Timely payment is also important and we are lucky enough to have found a way to make this work well with the minimum fuss and bureaucracy. Members of the network get paid for their contribution relatively quickly. This is important to make people feel valued.
What have you learned?/what would you do differently?
We have learned that it is really important to give people a proper briefing before their involvement to make sure that they are aware of the aims and objectives of the session they are about to be involved in. The people we work with tell us that they really enjoy being involved but only if they are aware of what is expected of them and what we want the students to get out of the session.
One thing which has been difficult for us and which we continue to struggle with is to ensure that we have good representation on the network with a wide range of service users and carers. We continue to struggle to involve children and young people in a meaningful way and currently do not have representation from users of criminal justice services or people who misuse substances. We also notice that we have difficulty in engaging with people on a longer-term basis. We are looking at ways in which we can make our meetings more accessible to people, maintaining interest on a longer-term basis.
What top tips could you offer to colleagues?