Looking across all three sites, it seems that the following factors are critical to ensuring that a user group is an effective approach to involvement:
- It is essential that any user involvement activity feeds directly into decision-making processes at the appropriate level, for involvement to be able to lead to change.
- For involvement to be successful it is vital that there are clear objectives for the involvement, both in the long-term and short-term.
- Setting up and running a user group is a resource intensive process. This means that the member of staff supporting the group has to have sufficient time and support themselves, not only to run the group, but also to integrate the group’s ideas into the work of the organisation.
- The staff member supporting a user group needs a distinct set of competencies and skills. This means that user involvement is not simply a task that can be added to another role. It also means that if the staff member does not already have these skills, they will need training and support to develop them.
- In planning user involvement, it is important to think about how to build - in informal and formal mechanisms to promote shared learning and support - for both the staff and the service users.
The evaluation report identified four sets of key messages from the project:
Key messages about preparing an organisation to involve
Key messages about planning involvement
Key messages about running a user group
Key messages about evaluating user involvement