Hi! My name is Amy Gaskin-Williams and I am the Involvement and Experience Manager for Nottinghamshire Healthcare.
It’s quite hard to explain exactly what an Involvement and Experience Manager does! They don’t exist in every NHS Trust and even when they do, their jobs are quite different to mine (as opposed to a universally recognised profession, such as a nurse).
I am one of the Involvement, Experience and Volunteering Team, and we are responsible for leading the Trust’s approach to three things:
- Involving people.
This means that we believe the organisation should involve people when they’re making decisions about how to best care for service users, their carers and their families. - Listening to, and acting on, feedback.
This means that we believe the organisation should seek feedback from service users, their carers and their families, and truly listen to and act on what they say. - Recruiting and supporting volunteers.
This means that we believe the organisation should welcome volunteers, recruit and induct them properly, and support them in their roles, as well as recognising the fantastic contribution they make to our services and to the lives of the people we’re caring for.
I feel very proud to work for the team that helps the organisation do those three things well. They’re very important to me, and I believe that they’re very important to the thousands of people we look after. People, especially when they’re at their most unwell, want to know that their voices count for something, that they matter, and that their unique perspective on our services is taken seriously.
So, what is it that I actually do?
- I oversee the two Involvement Centres and our Volunteering and Befriending Service
- I help Paul (our Head of Involvement, Experience and Volunteering) to report to Board and elsewhere on how well the organisation is involving people, responding to feedback and supporting volunteers
- I lead on point 2 above, how we support the organisation to capture and respond to feedback/patient experience
- I support the group of Involvement and Experience Leads in our services
My job is very varied, and I wouldn’t want it any other way! I have a lot of energy and enthusiasm, so it really suits me to be on-the-go and contributing to lots of different types of work.
To explain a bit about me, before joining Notts Healthcare I purposefully found jobs that gave me the opportunity to support people with a range of different conditions/circumstances (older people suffering with dementia, children in care, young adults with severe and complex learning disabilities etc). I loved this work, particularly being with young adults with learning disabilities, and some days I still miss it. I then joined Patient Opinion, where I worked with mental health Trusts across the country to capture and respond to patient feedback.
I came to Notts Healthcare in 2013 and I love my job as much today as I did in my first week (in fact, quite a lot more).