User Involvement in Voluntary Organisations Shared Learning Group
SHARED PRACTICE PAPER 4:
POLICIES TO SUPPORT SERVICE USER AND CARER INVOLVEMENT
WITHIN YOUR ORGANISATION
If you are promoting and supporting service user or carer involvement in your
organisation, you’ll find it helpful to ensure that you have policies in place to help this
to happen as smoothly as possible.
These are the policies we think it’s important to have in place:
An overall policy on user involvement
This may be part of a user involvement strategy, or it may be a corporate statement on
the value of user involvement. Having this in place can help you to ensure that
involvement happens across the organisation. Action for Blind People has a policy
like this.
An expenses policy
This should cover:
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What expenses you will pay. For example, will you cover childcare costs?
What about carer costs? Will you pay for service users to attend conferences
or training events?
How quickly you will pay expenses
Whether you will pay people expenses in advance to help them to buy tickets
without being out of pocket, or whether you can buy tickets for them.
What people need to do to claim expenses
A code of conduct
This might cover staff as well as service users, or might be specific to service users.
Breast Cancer Care has a Breast Cancer Voices Charter, which sets out how
involved service users are expected to behave. It covers things like respect for others
and the need to be a positive ambassador for Breast Cancer Care. Action for Blind
People has produced a handbook for service users who get involved. Again, the
behaviour expected of involved service users is listed in the handbook. Both of these
organisations require service users to sign up to an agreement about conduct.
The Prostate Cancer Charity has a code of practice called UNITED, where each
letter stands for an expected behaviour or attitude, which all employees are expected
to embrace. The PCC is exploring whether to extend this to service users who get
involved.
You should be clear in the code of conduct about what you will do if service users fail
to respect the code.
A confidentiality policy
Service users who get actively involved in an organisation may come across
confidential information – perhaps names and addresses of other service users, or
delicate financial information. It’s therefore important that service users are clear
about confidentiality requirements. For example, if you ask a service user to review
an application for research funding, can she or he share it with other service users to
get a wider range of views? Service users should know what confidentiality
requirements there are if they are given contact details by other service users. And
they should know that your organisation will keep information about them confidential,
too.
A complaints policy and procedure
Service users need to be clear about how they can raise a concern or complaint.
You’ll probably find that your organisation has a complaints policy. If this is the case,
ensure it’s applicable to service users, and ensure that service users are aware of it.
An insurance policy
You need to check that the insurance your organisation holds covers the activities of
involved service users – and what it covers.
Equality and diversity policy and strategy
Your organisation is very likely to have an equality and diversity policy and strategy.
This policy will hopefully cover issues around respect of people's differences, inclusive
and diverse participatory styles, concepts and choices, and equality of opportunity to
be able to participate in decisions that shape people's quality of life. An equality and
diversity policy can help you to ensure diverse participation in service user
involvement. So it’s helpful to have a look at this policy and to think about how it will
impact on your work to involve service users.
You may want to think about developing a policy (or familiarising your self with an
existing policy) on translation and interpreting. This will enable you to involve service
users who do not have English as a first language. Shelter is currently exploring this.
You may also want to develop a monitoring policy to ensure that you monitor the
range of users who are involved.
Need more information?
If you are a member of the Shared Learning Group, you’ll find examples of some of
these policies in the password protected section of the Group’s website – www.userinvolvement.org.uk. If you are not a member of the Shared Learning Group, please
use the ‘contact us’ form on our website and we’ll see what we can do to address any
queries you may have.
User Involvement in Voluntary Organisations Shared Learning Group
September 2008