In this resource, the term ‘user involvement’ means involving relevant groups of patients, or representatives from groups, in a dialogue about the commissioning, planning, evaluation and decommissioning of care services.
At its best, involvement should be an active, sustained process in which the knowledge and experiences of people living with diabetes influences and shapes decisions about diabetes services. The activity should clearly relate to decision-making in your organisation, and you should be able to demonstrate its impact.
In practice, most involvement takes the form of shorter-term pieces of work that influence an organisation’s thinking on a particular development or change. It can also be a review of patient experience of an existing service, which can be equally valuable, providing you are clear why you are involving people and what you intend to do with the results.
This resource doesn’t look at people’s involvement in decisions about their own care. For more information on this, otherwise known as care planning, see the Year of Care webpages:
http://www.diabetes.nhs.uk/year_of_care/