Evaluating service user and carer involvement

This section contains information you might find useful if you're interested in evaluating service user and carer involvement.

Discussion Papers

We have produced some discussion papers on topics which have been identified as being particularly important to our members.

Getting started with service user involvement

If you're thinking about taking forward service user and/or carer involvement in an organisation, and you have some resources, you may want to think about employing someone who will take the lead for this work. This section of the website is specifically devoted to recruitment. If you do appoint someone, please direct them to this website and to the Shared Learning Group. We've also included some other papers that might be helpful if you're near the beginning of the process of developing involvement in your organisation. Don't forget to look at the section of this site that's devoted to user involvement strategies, too.

How To Use This Website

This section has user guides for the website and the message boards.

Involving a range of service users - promoting diversity and equality

This section helps you to think about how you can involve a wide range of service users and carers.

Meeting Notes

This is where you will find notes of meetings of the Shared Learning Group.

Meetings

This gives the times and dates of all the Shared Learning Group Meetings

Methods for involving people

This section lists some websites and publications that give practical guidance on different methods for involving service users and carers. You should also look in the 'useful websites' section for more helpful links to involvement methods. Everything we've listed is free to download.

Policies to support service user involvement

In this section, we've attached some policies that can support successful service user and carer involvement. These include:
- A payment and expenses policy
- A confidentiality policy
- A charter outlining what a charity expects form service users who get involved, and what service users can expect from the charity
An equal opportunuties policy

Promoting service user involvement internally in your organisation

Look here first for ideas, papers and policies about how to promote service user and/or carer involvement within your organisation. But don't forget to look in other sections of this website as well - e.g. strategies of involvement

Publications - social care involvement

Here we've listed some publications about service user and carer involvement in social care. A lot of the information is transferable, so it's worth a look even if this isn't your area.

SCIE (see useful websites) is the source of lots of useful information on this topic.

Publications - voluntary sector involvement

This section lists some publications about service user and carer involvement in the voluntary sector. We have only listed publications which can be downloaded free of charge. Don't forget that the King's Fund Library (www.kingsfund.org.uk) has a good library and expertise in this field.

Research about involvement

This section gives links to research which has been undertaken about service user and carer involvement.

If you're interested in involvement in research, you should look at the INVOLVE website, www.invo.org.uk.

Shared practice papers

These are papers in which we aim to share our work on one particular area of service user and/or carer involvement.

Stories of involvement

At our meetings, we have begun to include an agenda item where a Shared Learning Group member shares their organisation’s ‘story’ of involvement – e.g. how user involvement has developed in their organisation, what the barriers have been and how they’ve tried to overcome them. We are summarising these stories so that learning can be shared.

Training

In this section. we're planning to include information about training service users and carers to get involved, and training staff about service user involvement. Dates for any specific training courses we know about will be in the calendar section of this website.

Useful Websites

This is a list of useful websites

User Involvement Strategies

This section is for member organisations to upload copies of their user involvement strategies or other important policy documents. Some documents in this section are for members only.