Region: National
Date: Tuesday 15th January 2008
‘Making it happen' is an exciting new project which is all about involving the people we support and giving them opportunities to voice their views and expectations of Robinia as a service provider for them to influence change. Our aim is to involve everyone and listen to their views and ideas about their service and support needs and then act upon their opinions.
The views and perceptions of the people on the receiving end of our services are really important to us and we want to ensure that everyone's views are valued and acted upon to ensure that we are meeting peoples needs. We recently held conferences and ‘Local Area Forums' in each of the regions which were all well attended and everyone seemed to enjoy meeting people from other services and sharing their ideas. They were very keen to become more involved in decisions about their support and other aspects of Robinia's work. Wendy Perez and her colleagues from Paradigm facilitated the conferences and made them both informative and enjoyable. A number of people who attended the ‘Local Area Forums' ‘excitedly' signed up to become Regional Reprentatives and attended the ‘National ‘Making it Happen Forum' which was held on the January 29th in Headhead, Surrey.
These are the issues which were discussed at the National Forum:
What we are happy about...
- Being Independent
- Having choice- being supporting and encouraged to choose
- Having support to find work
- Having my own key
- Support with our money
- Staff are there when you need them
- Staff are polite and helpful
- Staff are good fun
- Going out and about- going to the pub and singing
- College, dancing and shows
- Shopping
- Cooking
What we are not happy about...
- Not enough supported living services
- The name: ‘Service User’
- We want to be involved in training
- Being told what to do
- It's not right that people can't smoke in their own homes and that we have ‘No Smoking’ stickers on our front door
- Being shouted at
- Resources money has not gone up
- Lack of team work and communication
- Employing different people from different cultures - can create difficulties in communication
- People using my room
- Living with people who can be difficult and I didn't choose to live with them
- Staff shifts mean we can't stay out late when we want to
- Timetables can be unfair
- Lack of communication - not passing information on to us
Two representatives from the National Forum will be attending the next company Exectutive Committee Meeting to share the issues and views from the National Forum.
Videos and Photos from the meetings will be posted here soon so watch this space!
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