The Yorkshire and Humber Involvement Network brings together service users and staff from 15 different secure services that include NHS and private organisations providing low and medium secure care.
The Network is about sharing best practice, service improvement, and collaborative working to improve the experience and quality of support that people receive.
The network is facilitated by three Yorkshire and Humber Involvement Leads who are funded by all of the services as well as NHS England in order to coordinate and lead this work. There are many shared projects such as the CQUIN’s (Commissioning for Quality and Innovation) that bring all of the services together to work collaboratively across the region. The Involvement Leads also provide service in-reach to ensure that everyone has a chance to get involved and feed in to wider discussions.
Our pro-active approach means service users and staff all get involved to create and drive real change within services, supporting positive strategies to improve culture and mind-set within individual services and across the involvement network.
Communication is vital in ensuring that the network is accessible to all, using fun and creative ways to motivate and inspire people. Everyone benefits from knowing what other units are doing, and the network provides a space where everybody shares the ideas, challenges and solutions that helps services to not just be functional, but to aspire to be something fabulous
Looking back – History of the Network
Back in 2006, it was recognised by the commissioning team that there was a need for an involvement strategy which could bring service users, staff and commissioners together from secure services in Yorkshire and Humber, in a way that had never been done before.
This has developed over the years to become an established involvement network, sharing best practice and achieving real, meaningful outcomes. This genuinely improves the experience of everyone who lives and works in secure services.
The original vision was about bringing service users from Yorkshire and Humber together to understand what their experiences were like and make changes to drive improvement in the quality of secure mental health services. Two posts were created within the commissioning team to make this vision a reality, and the involvement lead roles were born.
One of the first things created by this new role was to bring a group of staff and service users from across different units to plan a conference to begin developing an involvement strategy. This created the blueprint for regional involvement between people who use services, staff and commissioners, from NHS and private hospitals providing low and medium secure mental health services.
Following this initial conference, the Reaching Joint Solutions Strategy was created. This provided a structure with various opportunities for involvement on a regional level as well as supporting services to develop their own involvement strategies. Common themes emerged that were shared across services, and a decision was made to work and develop these projects on a regional level at the same time as the development of CQUIN’s were emerging. The CQUIN’s in Yorkshire and Humber were based on these projects. The Reaching Joint Solutions Strategy can be found here: Reaching Joint Solutions Involvement Strategy
An example of one of these projects is the CPA standards which went on to become a national CQUIN. These can be found in the SeQuIn Tool section of this website under CPA Standards.
The Reaching Joint Solutions Strategy was evaluated by The University of Central Lancashire and has helped to shape the way that we work today and the evaluation report can be found here.
