| Our Directorate of Service-user Involvement ensures that the voices of those who use our services are represented at the most senior levels of the organisation. And our service-user steering groups inform Together’s practice and policy.
At a more local level, these are just a few examples of the very real ways in which people can change and help shape the Together services they use:
- people who live in our residential services take part in regular residents’ meetings, which discuss issues to do with the day-to-day running of their services
- our non-residential services also have members meetings where people can raise problems and make suggestions
- regular contact-monitoring meetings bring staff, our service partners and the people we support together to look at individual services and discuss improvements
- our quality-assurance system involves the people who use our services at every stage. People are asked for their views as part of regular standards-checking process and again at each service’s annual review
- people can also choose to get involved in the recruitment of new staff. Potential staff are interviewed separately by service-users and their views are taken into account at the final discussion and selection stages
- people who use our services are encouraged to get involved in training our staff and in our leadership training programme for people who use services.
Several of our Trustees are or have been users of mental health, as are many of our staff members.
Through our parliamentary and media work, we also represents the opinions of the people who use our services so that they can influence how the public views mental health and the policies and legislation that affect their lives.
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