Involvement

"Service users are at the heart of our organisation."

Cygnet Health Care is committed to building partnerships with our service users and carers. We have a clear direction for developing ways of ensuring that, through involvement, service users are placed firmly at the centre of their own care. We make sure that their valuable perspectives are also not lost when service improvements are considered. We also believe that both service users and carers should be involved as equal partners with professionals in planning and reviewing the mental health services they receive.

The expertise of our service users is unique and, wherever possible, we believe that service users should be involved in:

• Making decisions collaboratively with their multi-disciplinary team
• Care Planning
• Chairing their own CPA meetings
• Planning and improving service quality
• Staff recruitment and training
• Auditing quality standards such as the First Impressions project
• Providing feedback and completing surveys

All of our units actively engage with their service users. Units collate user feedback, audit views and, in addition, satisfaction surveys are given to all service users on discharge. Locally units also identify individual ward champions and hold regular involvement meetings attended by representatives of each ward.

As a direct result of our Involvement groups we have been able to implement a number of exciting initiatives. These include:

• Service users presenting new initiatives at Clinical Governance Meetings
• Ward Round guidance
• Section 17 Leave assessment
• Recovery Charter
• Service users attending training course alongside staff
• Service users attending external conferences alongside staff
• Fundraising events such as sponsored walks
• Pet Therapy and dog walking