Posted on: 5 March 2021
An update from Laura May on the Voice Exchange
Back in December 2020, we opened applications for people in Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea to join the Voice Exchange. This project, which is being run by Healthwatch Central West London on behalf of CNWL, will gather the lived experience of people who have used local mental health services.
On 29 January, the panel of citizen’s met for the first time at the launch meeting of the 'Voice Exchange'. This saw 14 members with a wide range of lived experience come together with staff from Healthwatch and CNWL to learn about the project. Our second meeting in February was well attended and we explored training and wellbeing support which may be useful.
So, what’s next? Well, from now until September the Citizen’s Panel will meet every month to explore ideas together with the aim of shaping services in the future. We also have a Deliberation Group running alongside this, bringing together individuals who have extensive experience of representing service users. We have begun hosting virtual drop-in sessions too for anyone to come along and share their experiences with the Voice Exchange.
Want to get involved?
Our next virtual drop-in session will be held at 7pm until 8pm on Tuesday 09 March via zoom. Everyone is welcome and we chat about what is working well, what could be improved and ideas for the future of mental health services.
Just join us via the zoom link below:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88130707337?pwd=RXExVHJiYnY2WSttUUJoUWVzTS9EUT09
Coming next month
In April the Voice Exchange will be launching a survey to capture feedback from the wider community. We will publish a link to this as soon as it goes live on this blog.