Challenges, changes and collaborative chats – a report on Involvement, Experience and Volunteering during COVID

It goes without saying that last year has been a real challenge for all of us due to COVID-19, and its impacts have been felt in different and differential ways. Because of this Nottinghamshire Healthcare through its Involvement, Experience and Volunteering (IEV) work continued in our commitment to listen to and work in partnership with our service users and carers. This provided us with challenges, led to changes and enabled us to have some great virtual and collaborative chats in our work together. Our Annual Involvement, Experience and Volunteering Report highlights some of the issues we have faced, our achievements, new ways of working and our plans for the future.

We are proud of the commitment of our service users and carer volunteers, our IEV and Carer Leads, staff and partner organisations. We would like to thank them for working with us during very difficult times to ensure we listen to and work with those that are suffering ill health, are vulnerable and who need support. You have all helped improve services for our service users and carers.

Over the last year we have had no face-to-face involvement but have worked hard to move this online with new mental health, loneliness and carers collaboratives; have had a significant drop in service user and carer feedback though we have begun to rollout feedback via text messages and promoted online methods; and we have not been able to have volunteers in our Involvement Centres though we have tried hard to keep people engaged and able to use technology to participate.  

Over the next year we are aiming continue to build inclusive collaborative partnerships to influence future services; to continue to rollout online feedback and listen to people’s stories of their experience of our services; and to bring volunteers back to our sites as well as maintaining virtual roles. To see some of what we are up to, you can read our blogs and follow us on Twitter and Instagram.

You can read our Annual Involvement, Experience and Volunteering Report here.


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