Waltham Forest has a commitment to engaging and learning effectively with service users and carers as part of the Councils Core Values. As a user or carer you have opportunities to get involved and influence the services that we provide to you. We are committed to consulting and involving you when making decisions, in a way and at a level that suits you. This includes keeping you informed, consulting with you on any plans or changes we want to make and involving you in making decisions about your health and wellbeing. This way you can help to continually improve our services by telling us:
- How good services really are
- What improvements we should make
- What our priorities should be
Involvement means that we can improve services by better tailoring them to user and carer needs and are accountable for the decisions we make. This means greater satisfaction with the services we provide and the opportunities to participate.
Developing a new User and Carer involvement Framework
As part of the drive to improve our services the Service Users and Carers Involvement Framework (46KB pdf document) sets out how you can play an important part in influencing our decisions and shaping our future. We aim to put our service users and carers at the heart of all our activities. We want to deliver the highest quality of services for you. We believe the best way to achieve this is to involve you at every step of the way. Without your comments, complaints and compliments, we cannot improve and develop as you want us to. We need and value your input, and have developed this Service Users and Carers Involvement Framework with you to ensure we get it right.
Valuing and including everyone
The needs of service users and carers vary greatly. The framework has been developed to support differences, both in meeting those needs, and also in terms of responding to communities who are not currently involved. The strategy reflects our Equality and Diversity Policies which have helped us to reach level 3 of the ‘Equality Standard for local Government’. Waltham Forest is a vibrant borough with people from many different backgrounds, and our residents mirror this. We will be using a variety of methods to make sure we involve everyone, and that users and carers who have not been actively involved in the past because of barriers such as culture, language, age, disability and learning difficulties can now become actively involved. We will give hard-to-reach groups extra support to make sure they can be involved.
Supporting you
Some service users and carers will already be actively involved and will have the skills and confidence to get involved with us on an equal footing. Others may be new to involvement, and see their lack of experience as a barrier. If you want to find out more there is a list of useful contacts in our Better Care, Higher Standards Charter.
We will:
- Offer help and cover out of pocket expenses when you attend any courses
- Offer support in helping you to identify any training needs
- Encourage you to go on training courses and conferences to build up your knowledge and skills, and mix with other users and carers
