The centre employs a User Involvement Worker; this is a new post and was created in November 2005. The last eight months have proved an exciting time for involving our parents and children in improving services.

The User Involvement worker aims to reach all its customers across all services at the Centre and activities include providing opportunities with relevant training for people to take part in staff recruitment, facilitating the nursery parent group, the setting up and running of a fun forum for contact children to support their interaction with other children in similar circumstances and developing systems to gain valuable feedback from all our customers to help us make our services better and support the development of new ones.

The Parent Group for the Nursery shows great potential for supporting both service improvement and development.

The group gives parents a say in how the nursery is run ensuring that it is always parent and child led. Staff have no pre conceived ideas of how the meetings should work and what should be discussed and outcomes have included the redesign of the satisfaction survey questionnaire, better marketing strategies, the organising of parent workshops and social events and feedback on the current fee procedure and paperwork

The contact centre fun forum was set up with an idea to providing a fun, structured session, once a month to those children using the contact centre to meet others in the same situation, have a good time and speak about their experiences if they so wish. The children have decided what activities they would like to do each month including bowling, Easter egg hunt and a trip up the spinnaker tower.

The User Involvement worker is an important role and will continue to obtain feedback from all our customers on how we can deliver and improve services as well as being more involved in the running of the organisation.

Interested?
For more information on our User Involvement work contact Laura Stokes on 023 9229 6919 or E-mail: laura.stokes@robertscentre.org.uk