Guidelines and standards
The guidelines and standards in this section show how we can grow and nurture involvement throughout our practice. These can be adapted and tailored to suit your local circumstances to help improve involvement within your current and future work practice.
- Good practice guidance for all programme leads to employ when involving service users and carers
This guidance has been developed to inform people about best practice, and to grow and nurture involvement within NIMHE and across the health and social care communities. It is a resource for anyone to use as a tool to improve involvement within their current and future work practice. - Minimum standards and recommendations supporting the involvement of all diverse and marginalised groups, their service users and their carers
These minimum standards were developed in response to issues highlighted within the Making a Real Difference report outlining how poorly people from groups outside of those of working age adults with experience of accessing secondary care mental health services, are engaged in the NIMHE programme and its activities.
The Minimum Standards are a set of overarching principles which will apply to all NIMHE programmes and activities at national or regional level. They acknowledge the rights of all service users and carers to work with NIMHE, whatever their background. They are also part of a culture change within NIMHE towards a more people-focused approach, built on mutual respect. - Good practice guidelines for commissioners regarding how they can support involvement at a local level
These good practice guidelines were developed in direct response to recommendation 5 within the Making a Real Difference report;
“A key focus for NIMHE should be enabling and supporting service users and carers to be involved in local groups. NIMHE needs to work with commissioners to support investment in the development of local mental health and service user and carer groups”
They provide guidelines for Regional Development Centre (RDC) staff to share with commissioners to enable them to focus on how they support existing and commission new service user and carer led services in the area. - Involvement Leadership training recommendations
This report is a compilation of positive training and support practice already delivered within CSIP/NIMHE via the existing leadership programmes. It also looks beyond NIMHE for other similar examples of training courses and support systems for service user and carer leadership. It also sets out a model of involvement, detailing the different levels of involvement within the organisation. - Guidelines for Regional Development Centre’s regarding payment for involvement
One of the key areas the Making a Real Difference report defined was the development of national payments policy guidance. This would establish some consistency in the way that service users and carers are rewarded and reimbursed for their participation in NIMHE.
The document has been designed to deliver that consistency, by providing a template from which CSIP Development Centres and NIMHE national programmes are able to produce procedures tailored to their own needs.