leeds involving people

Shaping Health and Social Care

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What is
Involvement

'Involvement' - or 'service user involvement' - is the process of involving people who receive and use services in decisions that affect those services.

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Supporting
Organisations

We support organisations by promoting the benefits of involvement so you can involve your service users and support them to become 'involvement ready'.

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Supporting
Individuals

We can support you to become 'involvement ready' to ensure that your voice is at the centre of decision making processes affect the services you use.

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Become a
Member

If you're an individual or organisation and want to know more about how you can get involved with Leeds Involving People please become a member.

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What is Involvement

'Involvement - or 'service user involvement' - is the process of involving people who receive and use services in decisions that affect those services. Involvement empowers people to voice their opinions and concerns and encourages them to speak for themselves. This often means consulting people on particular issues, inviting them to events, or asking them to be members of formal groups and networks that have a focus on involving people.

Involvement is also a legal requirement under the 'Duty to Involve' that came into force in 2009. This means it is a statutory obligation for specified public bodies, such as those who provide health and social care services, to consult and involve people who are likely to be affected by the decisions they make.

Leeds Involving People's approach to involving people is based on the following principles:

  • Listening impartially to people, often to those that are overlooked or unheard, regarding their views, experiences and opinions on how public services affect their daily lives.
  • Consulting with people around specific changes to services in order to gather their opinion and feedback their views to commissioners and public bodies.
  • Involving people by developing mechanisms for the voice of the community to be an ongoing key influence in the planning and development of current and future public services.
     

We ensure these principles are put into action by:

  • Bringing people together: We ensure our delivery is user-led and the people we work with reflect the diverse communities in our society, providing opportunities for them to meet collectively to discuss specific issues affecting their lives and the services they use.
  • Outreaching into the community: We reach out and develop trust with those communities that are often overlooked to ensure our involvement activity is representative of our diverse communities and that our activities remove barriers to engagement.
  • Representing opinion: We work with people to understand their specific areas of interest and the issues affecting their daily lives to ensure the opinions we gather are representative of those who use services, particularly those who are hard to reach or often overlooked.
  • Influencing change: We represent the independent voice of people ensuring their opinions and concerns are key to development of services. We work with other community organisations to develop new areas of work when gaps in service provision have been identified by the community.
  • Signposting to other services: We develop strong relationships with other providers so we are able to signpost people onto services available to them in their community. We actively promote involvement opportunities offered by other providers and encourage the people we work with to engage with these.
  • Delivering projects: We deliver high quality and accessible involvement activity on behalf of our key funders to ensure services are transformed to improve people’s lives. We work with public bodies and commissioners to ensure services are developed in partnership with those who use them.
  • Offering training: We offer training that promotes best practice in involvement and its benefits when done effectively. We work with individuals to develop their understanding of how services are commissioned so they have the confidence to speak in front of others about their views and experience in a professional manner. We support service providers to effectively involve their services users.

For more information about our involvement training please visit our training section or join our mailing list

Your Opinion Matters

have your say

If you are interested in getting involved with Leeds Involving People we'd be very grateful if you could take the time to fill in one or more of our short surveys to tell us more about how you’d like to be involved.