From acting on to working with - Service User groups to Participant Panels
There is growing recognition in health and social care settings the importance of moving towards a partnership approach. A ‘service user group’, hearing from those who access the service to input recommendations on how to improve it, is one of the most common ways of doing this.
However, this terminology is outdated. It reinforces the mentality that services are designed to deliver to, not deliver for. It sounds cold, clinical and it removes the person from the partnership.
Fortunately, this post isn’t about semantics, it is about improving the ‘service user group’ to encourage better, more meaningful participation with the people who benefit from the support. Changing the name to better reflect the collaborative intention is the first step.
Here's a breakdown of a recent project I ran with LSE Student Wellbeing Services using this more inclusive model for participation and engagement.
The ‘Student Wellbeing Services Panel’ was initiated in response to the need for Student Wellbeing Services to get input from students in order improve how it is run for students. This is linked to a wider move towards using the student voice to inform and improve student facing services.
The core innovation for this process to ensure a more inclusive, collaborative approach were in the selection.
Selection
To ensure inclusive representation of students, we incorporated the gold standard selection used by the Sortition Foundation. Students who had previously engaged with Student Wellbeing Service were contacted via email and invited to register their interest to participate in the Student Wellbeing Service Panel. They were asked to submit information about themselves including gender, level of study and which services they had accessed. There were 45 students who registered their interest.
The students were then selected using Sortition Foundation stratified random selection software. This ensured there was a 50:50 gender split (no third gender participants registered), 60:40 postgraduate: undergraduate split (reflecting the make-up of LSE student) and each service, Wellbeing, Mental Health, Disability and Counselling had been accessed by at least four participants. As recognition of their time and efforts, Students were given a £15 gift voucher for their participation in each panel.
A breakdown of the selection process for the panel
Key benefits of using this approach:
Avoid negative effects of self-selection – With open invites to participation, these groups attract those with an agenda to contribute, often those with an outsized negative experience. However, by minimizing the effort of the initial sign-up, sending out direct invitation based on selection and offering an incentive to participate. The panel is more likely to reflect the diversity of the group you are looking to represent. This means that the sessions can become more productive linked to shared aims and experiences, not dominated by a single, strong opinion.
Ensuring inclusion – This approach ensures inclusion and diversity without embedding bias by trying to manufacture representation through manual selection. The algorithm used offers the fairest possible probability for every participant, while still ensuring each of the demographic quotas are filled. The maximises the cognitive diversity of the participant group, and therefore, increases its efficacy.
Flexible representation – Using this software gives the convener flexibility to adjust the panel selection to best reflect the voice you want to represent. For example, a future panel may want to explore specific impacts on disabled students. The selection can be easily adjusted here to ensure the views of disabled students are better represented.
To improve the selection for future panels, we will look to embed the sign-up for panel into normal data collection processes in the service. This will again help to remove friction to participation, broadening the number of sign-ups, therefore, increasing the efficacy of the selection process.
Facilitation
The purpose of this session was to provide learning to opportunity to feed into wider development of engagement and co-production strategy with students. The facilitation was designed to reflect this.
For future panels, greater consideration would be taken with the session facilitation linked to intended outcomes of each session. For example, using design thinking approaches when focused on designing initiatives or services. Alternatively, the use of expert testimony and deeper deliberation when drafting policy. Furthermore, when the outcomes of the session are more consequential to the population it works for, more effort would be made to allow for wider input for non-participants to contribute.
The point being here that to ensure that quality engagement is a prerequisite to ensure these panels are not just tokenistic but productive, not only for the participants but those who are initiating them.
Overall, the Student Wellbeing Services Panel was a success. It was easy to convene, more inclusive of the diversity of the student voice and received positive feedback for students looking for more meaningful ways to contribute.
While the Service User Group has been an important model for representing the views of all stakeholders. It is about time to embrace inclusive terminology and practice to ensure more meaningful engagement moving forward.