Involvement and Inclusion at Access
Enabling, Empowering, Improving
We have made a commitment to ensure our customers are heard, and their perspectives and ideas are valued.
We do this through our organisation wide Lived Experience Advisory Forums (LEAF).
These forums are facilitated spaces that focus on:
- Enabling people to participate in decisions and actions that affect their lives.
- Creating opportunities and activities designed to facilitate a change in how our services or policies are delivered or implemented to improve the experience for the individual as well as the service.
- Empowering individuals to exercise their rights, and to achieve their potential and aspirations, whilst developing services that are innovative, aspirational and effective.
Leaf at STEAM
Our STEAM house cafes offer mental health support across Suffolk and Norfolk, with our LEAF embedded across our sites, to ensure we are hearing the experiences of our customers and working collaboratively with them as we develop the service.
We capture the voices of these individuals and create opportunities for their stories to be used to inform and influence positive change.
Working with our customers we have established clear pathways to give feedback on their experiences of the service, which includes surveys, a comments and ideas box, focus groups and one to one discussions.
Feedback is gathered and explored, then fed back to service managers with a quarterly document available to customers to view with responses to requests and ideas.
Soon, all sites will have a ‘you said, we did’ wall visual, visible to all staff and customers in the cafes. A quarterly report is shared with stakeholders which includes findings, learnings and actions.
Are you a STEAM customer/carer of a customer? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
| Click here to take our anonymous survey |
Our Manager of Involvement and Inclusion also gathers thoughts, ideas and experiences of the wider mental health system and represents the LEAF at stakeholder meetings, bringing the perspective of lived experience to discussions and decision making around mental health service provision.
For more details please contact our Manager of Involvement and Inclusion Beth Stephens – beth.stephens@accessct.org
Waveney Leaf
The Waveney LEAF is the result of grounding discussions, ideas, values and learning into reality, and is the result of ongoing collaboration with the Waveney community.
The LEAF works closely with statutory services to ensure diverse voices are heard and valued in decision making processes, and through regular meetings, workshops and collaboration sessions amplifies the voices of lived experience in the ongoing mental health service transformation.
Our community facilitator hosts groups and wellbeing activities across local towns and villages, creating opportunities for meaningful connection and supporting access to services through signposting, information, advice and guidance.
Working closely with local services such as the DWP, NSFT, local businesses and volunteers we are helping to identify and reduce isolation and create spaces for connection and community, where all voices are valued.
Jade also hosts a monthly wellbeing walk, the fourth Thursday of every month in Lowestoft – More information can be found here.
For more details please contact our LEAF community facilitator Jade Drinkwater at jade.drinkwater@accessct.org
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