Equal Service User Involvement Project

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Equal Service User Involvement Project

• Practitioner Event
• 8th March 2007

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Equal Access to Employment in GlasgowREFocus
Development Partnership

• Alison McCrae Equal Access
• Margaret-Ann Brunjes Glasgow Homelessness
  Network

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How can we ensure that service user involvement
is embedded within policies and organisations?
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Presentation outline

• Equal Access and REFocus background
• Work to date
• Learning
• How we are progressing learning

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Equal Access and REFocus

• Equal Access is a strategy and a partnership
• REFocus Development Partnership Theme A, 20
  projects
• EA and REFocus staff facilitate implementation
  of EA with the partners
• Work to date
• Service user involvement consultation
• Empowerment Working Group

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Service User InvolvementEqual Access Consultation

• How can EA involve SU?
• Consultation events, workshops, focus groups,
  interviews
• What was revealed

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Service User Involvement Recommendations for
Equal Access

• Continue to engage to inform/update and gather
  opinions through partners but short term and not
  sustainable
• Equal Access is about mainstreaming
• Capture detail of activity
• Capacity build through partners who have no SUI
  structure

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REFocus Empowerment Working Group

• Cross cutting theme empowerment
• Mainstreaming theme - Empowerment Working Group
• Examining relation to service user involvement

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Current activity Empowerment Working Group

• What have we learned? Examining activity within
  projects and partners (employment services)
• Looking at links between SUI and empowerment
• Reviewing the evidence and deciding how to move
  learning through policy, organisations

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• A published review of REFocus projects and
  partners activity and learning and how this
  learning could be mainstreamed
• Policy and practice level recommendations that
  can be mainstreamed across the City Strategy in
  Glasgow and its services
• A business case formula for service user
  involvement to encourage empowerment and
  involvement across employability services in
  Glasgow

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Embedding in policy some questions and
suggestions

• How do we make sure that service users can
  influence policy development?
• Through gathering information from services?
  -making it a more robust funding requirement,
  move beyond tick boxes and to real practice?
• Making the link between policy and practice

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Embedding in organisations some questions and
suggestions

• All levels culture change programme
• Resource it
• Action plan it
• Many varied techniques but embedded in daily
  practice
• Consider using SUI as an employability tool?