As a Trust we encourage service users and carers to join the Service User and Carer Council (SUCC) who can use their lived experience to help shape our services across Lancashire and South Cumbria.
Service users and their families are experts in understanding what is needed thanks to their own experience of mental distress or physical ill health. It's vital that members of SUCC to feel empowered to help develop services by inviting volunteers to give their views and be an active member of the council.
Meetings may be held face-to-face or virtually.
Apply to join the service user and carer council.
We have SUCCs across all our networks, you can find out more about what each network provides below:
The Central and West Lancashire service user and carers forum meet twice monthly, with representatives from mental health, phsyical health, childrens services, health watch and our patient experience team.
Our aims:
- Learn from feedback to improve services
- Spread 'You Said We Did' across community services
- Promote and share engagement activity
- Build on our triangle of care accreditation in our wards
- Implement triangle of care in community services
- Encourage service users and carers to join our council and help us improve
Chair: Lorna Pink
Mission statement: Service users and carers are experts by experience; equally their judgments may be informed by the care they witness others receiving. Their experiences empower them to be meaningfully involved in discussions around quality, experience and service improvement.
What is the role of the forum?
- Promote service user and carer involvement across the Fylde Coast.
- Work on dedicated projects.
- Support with training opportunities.
- Involvement in the planning and development of new services.
- Seek and represent the views of service users and carers.
Get involved: If you would like to find out more, come along to our next meeting which takes place each month at the Blackpool Carers Centre, Newton Drive.
Please contact the council for more information.
The Bay network join together monthly with families and carers across Lancaster Morecambe Barrow and South Cumbria. The group is represented by families and carers, mental health services, county councils, local carers groups and patient experience teams. Guest speakers are also organised to keep everyone up to date with quality improvement work across the network.
Our aims are to:
- Encourage families and carers to work collaboratively with us to influence change and promote improvement
- Listen to feedback and learn from what we are hearing.
- Share good news and developments in the network
- Feedback on the ‘You said we did’ for community and inpatient services
- Support the embedding of the Triangle of Care into the Community
- Help to shape any future training needs
Please email Sam Bennet or Julie McLardy-Smith for more information and how to get involved.
Pennines Service User and Carer Council (SUCC) meets every six weeks on a Wednesday. We alternate morning to afternoon to try and offer some flexibility and also alternate venues to include our inpatient sites including Royal Blackburn Hospital and Woodview along with community sites which include Balladen House, Chai Centre, Globe Centre. We aim to locate at various venues in Pennine to support members to attend in person. We also offer this on teams in case people can’t attend.
We have agenda at the meetings to try to cover the areas that our current members would like to discuss, we discuss membership and how to improve, we discuss service changes to support understanding, we talk about any new posters, policies, flyers that the Trust would like SUCC opinions about, we look at how we can improve our populations voice and what activities may be of interest to our members.
If anyone is interested to please email Gillian McKie or James Briggs for more information and how to get involved.
Information coming soon
Testimonials
Steve Gratrix, Chair of Fydle Coast SUCC
"The effort is worth the outcome"
- The Trust can only operate with us being here
- Empowerment
- Being heard
- My experience is its compassionate and understanding
- To be a part of a positive system change
- Meaningful involvement
- To share my own lived experience
- Carer involvement
- Service users and carers of their own health and health for all is vital
- We are all VIPs
- To gain a larger underpinning knowledge as a service user and someone who has seen services improve overtime
- To make a difference
- To improve our mental health service and ultimately improve lives
- I found out about the service user group to share my own life experience
- To influence change within the service
- To improve services and highlight issues
We said: It's boring on the ward, there's not much to do!
You did: Organised activities which our son enjoys doing, like going with ward staff to play golf, which has really helped his recovery.
