User Involvement             Services for Carers            Counselling/Information     

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Welcome to MHA User Involvement

MHA is committed to empowering service users by involving them across our organisation.

There is evidence of excellent practice in many of our projects where service users (members) have a high profile in the life of the centres and beyond.   User/members meetings happen regularly and are conducted with members, with staff in attendance where required.  A system of member representatives is evident in all our day centres and our supported accommodation.

It would be true to say however that there is no room for complacency in relation to our vision of full user participation throughout the organisation and we could learn from examples of best practice to ensure equality of opportunity for all.  To this end we are about to set up an MHA User Forum which will, we hope, meet on a regular basis and will enable us to support user representatives from all of our services to have a collective voice to influence and shape current and future service provision as well as raising their policy and campaigning profile should they wish to do so.  We hope to be able to support our service users through the forum to initially be involved as equal partners in the sub groups of our Board of Directors and to eventually take up positions as full Board Members.  We recognise the danger of being tokenistic in this regard, so intend to support them through induction training to be active and to fully participate at Board level. 

We have ambitious plans to improve our practice in relation to service user involvement and hope this will be reflected on this webpage as we progress in this area.