Where Do You Stand with Service Users?

Abstract

This contribution to Critical Forum comes from Shaping Our Lives, a UK national user-controlled development project and network which has also established a National User Group to develop thinking on service provision and outcomes from a user perspective. Set up in 1996 with initial funding from the Department of Health, it is now supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Its aim is to involve user organizations and service users across user groups, including people with physical and sensory impairments, older people, people with learning difficulties, people living with HIV/AIDS and mental health service users and survivors. Shaping Our Lives has also sought to address other forms of difference, according to race, gender, disability and sexuality. At the same time, while Shaping Our Lives and its National User Group seek to reflect the diversity and viewpoints of service users, neither makes any claim to represent them. Shaping Our Lives currently manages two other national user-led projects. The first of these is Our Voice in Our Future, which supports social care service users in order that they may have a voice in welfare reform locally and nationally. The second initiative supports user involvement in the General Social Care Council and other new social care bodies established by the government to set and regulate standards in care. Shaping Our Lives is actively committed to placing service users at the centre of the government’s Quality Strategy for Social Care, to full access to employment by social care service users, to enforceable civil rights to end the barriers posed by inappropriate housing and public transport and to the achievement of flexible support services that are led by users and their needs.