Involving Young People in Service Delivery
KCA's Young Persons' Services works with vulnerable young people providing drug and alcohol information and advice, improving health and well-being, and engaging young people in treatment. Young people are central to what we do, so why not ask our client group if what we are doing is any good, and if they have ideas about what we could do better?
A few of us at work began meeting to discuss how we could proceed with young person's participation in our service. We became excited at the prospect of being able to involve our young people at every level of service, from getting their advice on the design of a cannabis leaflet; to having young people sit on an interview panel and having their say in who should be selected for the post. After a few trials and errors, we have now managed to perfect the art of involving young people in interview panels, providing them with sufficient training on equal opportunities and open-ended questioning.
High on enthusiasm, we were eager to take things further. We now wanted to hold a Focus Group, where we would invite our clients to join us for a whole day of participation. Before we knew it, on the 14th of October we were running our pilot Focus Group. Senior Management at our Head Office in Faversham, Kent were more than happy to have our young service users around the building for the day. The day was a great success - with juice and snacks to fuel their ideas, our young people were keen to tell us their opinions on how they felt when they were first contacted by their worker, what could have made their first appointment experience easier, and what they liked about their treatment process. It was amazing to have a genuine service user group feeding back their ideas about how they saw the service, what they liked, and what could be improved. Admittedly, some of the things we thought they would love, they didn't, and resources we thought they would think were rubbish, were great ideas!
To us, the day proved how important it is to remind ourselves that our clientele's thoughts are key to our service and its development. After all, if we're creating a service for a certain population surely we should find out what it is THEY want from US? Including young people in decisions that affect them is of utmost importance to KCA and there is no reason why every service cannot involve their service user's in development. Most importantly, our Focus Day not only benefited us, with young people providing us with some invaluable advice, but it also gave them the opportunity to feel listened to, appreciated and respected - what every young person wants.
Posted 4 April 2011