Patient Council
Patient involvement is central to how North London Forensic Collaborative (NLFC) delivers its commissioning responsibilities. The patient council represents the voices of inpatients and plays a vital role in the co-design of quality improvements and new service developments.
Patient council members are provided with training and supervision, which can lead to a career pathway into peer engagement worker paid roles within the commissioning hub, as well as further expert by experience roles within the community.
A key achievement of the patient council has been the design and implementation of a patient led 'Speak up campaign' to support service users in raising concerns, to feel empowered to speak up and confident that any issues raised are taken seriously. A consultation took place to understand what could be done to support service users in the process of raising a concern and a key outcome of this has been the design and implementation of patient empowerment boxes, which are secure feedback boxes that will be visible on all our inpatient wards.
Peer Engagement Workers
The collaborative has a peer engagement worker team which includes five paid staff who have lived experience of forensic or inpatient mental health services, recruited to work alongside case managers in a quality assurance role. The team has recently been expanded to include a community peer engagement worker to extend this role across all inpatient and community services.
Using their lived experience, peer engagement workers build rapport with service users and gather important insights from wards. They also provide a strong communicative link between service users, providers and the commissioning hub. They are present on wards and in community teams speaking directly to patients about their care experience, to ensure that the voice of service users is central to all aspects of quality improvement and service development. Peer engagement workers also assist with reviews of restrictive interventions, conduct service reviews and report into contract meetings.
What their patient council and peer engagement workers say:
The patient council gives myself and my peers a voice. We can express ourselves about things that are happening in the hospital, and we can help to make positive changes.
We are here to help every service user, it's highly refreshing to help each other…we are one team with different minds.
As a peer engagement worker, I have helped to build rapport, bridging the gap between service users and professionals.
As a team I would like us to continue positively impacting the lives of current and future service users. To create an environment and service that is working towards the progress and sustenance of a positive mental well-being for all service users in our care.
Learning disability and autism lived experience model
NLFC works in partnership with service users, providers and staff in its adult secure services to design, deliver and embed a user involvement model that empowers and elevates the voices of people who use services, ensuring that they are central to the way services are commissioned and quality assured.
By building on its existing expert by experience model within adult inpatient secure settings, NLFC is creating a lived experience model for learning disability and autism inpatient and community services. To support this process, the commissioning hub is working collaboratively with a multi specialist partnership of organisations offering a depth of experience in designing and delivering peer roles, leading national best practice in co-production and embedding lasting transformation in the NHS that centres on lived experience.
Learning events
NLFC encourages continuous professional learning and development of its workforce. Staff professional groups and pathway groups hold one learning event per annuum to share good practice, evidence-based research on delivering forensic mental health services, and innovative approaches for supporting the differing needs of its service users. Patients and experts by experience are also supported to co-present their work and achievements at learning events.
The learning events are consistently popular with an attendance of 450 plus forensic mental health staff during the last year.