The input of service users and carers is invaluable to health and social care courses. One way you can contribute is by sharing your story for us to include in our courses.
When you tell students about your direct experiences of health and social care services you help encourage more user-centred professional practice. This also helps the course team to identify which areas of professional knowledge and understanding have an impact on service users. Students taught by users and carers are likely to work more effectively than those taught about users and carers.
If you offer to share your story with students, we will develop it as a case study, for use in different ways. For example, we can use it to:
All of this helps students improve their practice.
There are two ways in which you can share your story – directly or indirectly.
You can be interviewed and tell your story yourself either for an audio recording or a DVD. This will involve three or four meetings with the course production team.
First, a course author will contact you by telephone to discuss your experiences, your willingness to share your story and your involvement. This conversation will help the author decide what issues your story highlights and which ones she might use as teaching points for students.
The next meeting might be with the author and a producer whose responsibility it is to develop CDs and DVDs for new courses. Timing, location and other details of your involvement will be arranged. Often people’s stories are allowed to emerge from an interview whereby the author or producer will ask you questions that have been agreed beforehand. Your answers would be based on your experiences of particular situations such as a community care assessment or hospital discharge procedures or receiving home care services. The location of this meeting could be your home or another venue that is convenient for all concerned. You would not be expected to travel long distances to attend these meetings. You may be asked to sign a contract for this bit of work before the third meeting.
At the third and final meeting your story would be recorded or filmed. You would not be asked to travel to a recording studio – this could take place in your own home or another mutually convenient location. At this meeting, you might find that as well as the course author and producer being present there might also be a cameraman and/or a sound technician and production assistant. The number of people you will meet and the intrusion into your private life, will at all times, be kept to a minimum.
Once your story has been recorded or filmed, you will be sent a copy and asked to check if for accuracy. If it contains anything that you are not happy with you can ask for it to be deleted. Only once you are happy with the recording will it be used for teaching students. You will be provided with a final copy of the recording on a CD or DVD.
If you prefer, you can be indirectly involved by sharing your story with a course writer only. In this instance, a course writer would contact you to set up a meeting. She would essentially come and interview you at a time and place that were convenient for you both. This would be the only contact would have unless the writer had further question or needed to clarify something with you. The course writer would then write a dramatised version of your story which would be developed into a case study. In this case, actors would speak all the lines and play all the parts. So instead of you being interviewed and recorded as described in the section above, it would be an actor or actress that would be interviewed and recorded. Your identity would not be revealed and you would not be sent the tapes or asked to check them for accuracy.
You might like to think about sharing your story if you:
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