Ageless at Work - Skills for Care

• Support and enable people to use personal budgets. These help people to shape their
own services in the most direct way.
Reward people for sharing their expertise.
• Acknowledge individuals as experts by rewarding them for their time and contribution, as
well as meeting their expenses.
• Be aware, and make your participants aware, than any payment made will impact on state
benefits.
• Include budgeting for payments in the planning stage of any change.
Be aware of under-representation
• Identify those who are rarely involved and whose voices are rarely heard.
• Be flexible and creative, and find out who can find solutions to participatory barriers.
• Steps to improve representation include: diversity training, including information on family
life; forming partnerships with local organisations that work with diverse and marginalised
groups; ensuring that service users who participate represent a wider constituency;
remembering to include groups that are not often asked or left out, such as black and
minority ethnic service users, and carers in same-sex relationships.
Offer training
• Be aware than information, support and training will be valuable for all those involved in
change. This could be arranged by contacting local user-led organisations, putting the
people who use your service in touch with each other, or commissioning training on a
specific topic.
• Providing training particularly important in enabling users to participate more effectively
and take on more responsible roles such as becoming board members. This might
include training on assertiveness, negotiation, meeting and committee procedures, and
legal rights.
Develop local relationships
• Consider what steps can be taken to develop positive relationships between providers
and the people who use services.
• Understand and acknowledge the value of user-controlled organisations, which should
increasingly develop in each locality.
• Agree lines of communication and ways to encourage discussion, consultation and
accountability
• Build on the experience of people who use services, who are practical experts, and use
their involvement to help change attitudes.
Skills for Care South West’s guidebook “The Value of Learning: Creating a Learning Organisation
(Skills for Care South West, 2009) provides ideas about how residents and people who use services
can contribute to the development of a learning organisation. This includes asking them for their
views about services on a regular basis and the use of ‘witness testimonies’ as evidence in the
compilation of NVQ portfolios.
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Ageless at Work: Change workplace cultures, development skills. Good practice report