Yes that’s right, I’m still Jonathan but I have a different role in the Involvement, Experience and Volunteering Team! I’ve moved away from managing the Involvement Centre and I’m working more broadly across services in Local Partnerships.
So, what does that mean? I used to manage the Involvement Centre at Duncan Macmillan house, which meant working closely with the volunteers that came in, we would find projects and try to help make changes in services. I no longer run the centre and I now have to go out across Local Partnerships to find the projects and then involve those the service users and carers from those services in helping to make changes to services. We might get ideas from feedback about services, a manager coming to me for a specific project they are considering, or a more direct steer from the executive of Local Partnerships, Paul Smeeton about what the priorities are for those services. Yes my world just got bigger!
Throughout all this, everything I’ve learnt from working in the centre around co-production and involvement is how I approach any task. So what am I currently working on?
- A systematic approach to feedback in Adult Mental Health (AMH) services – how do we really understand feedback across this service and how can we work through any actions or suggestions to improve services that might come from it together?
- Embedding the learning from the Ideal Ward Round project into wards – This is a project that started in the Involvement Centre to improve the ward round (sometimes called reviews) experience for inpatients on adult mental health wards. Contact me if you would like to know more about the project or see the recommendation we developed.
- Developing a model for collaborative service change following on from work we’ve done with the Kings Fund. This is a model on ‘how’ groups of people, or organisations can work together collaboratively; it includes strategies for listening to each other, better understanding of when you might rush to a decision without considering options and importantly how to involve as many people as possible in the process.
- Supporting collaboration in Child and Adolescent Mental health Services (CAMHS) with both a Siblings Group and the development of a Collaborative Partnership (this is linked to the above work on a collaborative model) for the new Hopewood site
- Supporting the Trust’s Developing our People and Culture Together DOPACT This is looking at the culture of the organisation and how we can make a positive difference for staff working at Nottinghamshire Healthcare.
Yep, I’m busy but all of the work has a common thread; working together to improve services. The working together part I have become particularly interested in and I will post another blog up here soon with some of my learning and thinking over the past year.
Jonathan Wright
Involvement & Experience Lead for Local Partnerships