Welcome to a brief update of my Joint Southwark and Lambeth Mental Health carers forum for August 2021. There was no speaker for that month so I presented on the following being:

The Importance of carer involvement

Plus I also presented on Carer empowerment

Funnily enough the turn out for the joint forum was very good and to be honest I couldnt present for a long while due to carers speaking to each other on how things have been developing for them.

When I presented on carer involvement, I spoke on the following concepts about the importance of carer involvement.

• How Experiences of carers should be valued
• Lessons are learned from carer experiences and applied to services
• Different skill sets are used and acquired from those involved
• Well-being is at the heart of the decision making process of the NHS

There was then a discussion on how can one get involved in their Mental health trust. I raised the following points

• Becoming a member of their trust
• Signing up to an involvement register
• Volunteering your skills outside the register
• Attending Service user or Carer forums that the trust engages with.

Many carers started talking about South London & Maudsley’s new governor votes and wondered what it would be like to be a carer governor.

I then moved on to talking about the types of involvement, the following points I talked about.

Providing your views as a representative at a service improvement meeting or working group.

• Getting involved in the recruitment and selection process of staff.
• Helping inspect trust services for the purposes of audit.
• Co-deliver trust training e.g. training mental health staff
• Speaking at an events – Staff Inductions, awareness days
• Contributing to the development of policies or reviewing information

I spoke about my term as a carer governor for the mental health trust, but it was a long time ago and I do not remember as much as I used to. I mentioned Lambeth’s Clubhouse Moasic were due to attend for this month, but because of the pandemic; things were on hold.

This was the brief update of my Joint Southwark & Lambeth MH carers forum for August 2021.