Service User Involvement

As a key Cross Cutting Theme in our five year Street to Strategy, Mainliners believes wholeheartedly in the need for comprehensive service user involvement in the design and delivery of services.

Mainliners is committed to ensuring that service user involvement is more than consultation or seeking views, and means users have equal involvement as a stakeholder, and are central to the design, delivery and review of services and activities.

We believe that by making sure that the voices of our service users are heard, we will ensure that they are able to have a genuine influence on the support they receive, which leads to greater effectiveness within Mainliners itself.

We have highlighted two areas as central to making user involvement work. These are: people being able to get together to work collectively for change and mutual support, and the importance of making known their own experience, views and ideas.

This will be achieved by:

• Having a transparent and accountable process for service users to influence policy and practice within Mainliners, e.g. via representation on the board of trustees, members of service steering groups, and representation at key external meetings, including funders monitoring meetings.
• Ensuring service users are central to our operations by guaranteeing their involvement in all key operational activities, including the annual business plan review and the subsequent years planning process
• Promoting service user groups to ensure service users play a central role in the planning, delivery and evaluation of all our services, and encouraging a culture of facilitative leadership within these groups.
• Enabling services users to be fully active in the groups and at meetings by offering empowerment and other development training
• Supporting service users to have influence in policy in the wider environment by ensuring they are represented at relevant forums and conferences