What does the recovery journey from post-natal depression to grandmother feel like?
How does the inequity between mental health and physical health services feel when it affects you personally?
If we don’t understand these things, hear these stories, feel these experiences, how can we reflect on practice, service provision or prioritisation?
Since 2011, the Patient Voices Programme has helped mental health service users and carers in Manchester tell their own stories about experiences of care through their own choice of words and images, rather than through interviews, focus groups or surveys.
Privacy and dignity are fundamental to the well-being of individuals within the health care system.
Every member of the workforce should place dignity in care at the heart of their practice, informed by appropriate training on the issues of dignity, respect and privacy. 'This is particularly true of staff caring for older people or those with mental health needs.’ (Commission for Healthcare Audit and Inspection, 2006).
To build dignity and respect for service users into the training of professionals, we need to know what stories of dignity and respect service users carry with them.
The Patient Voices reflective digital stories in the "Dignity and respect" series were created in participatory workshops sponsored by Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust.
The stories are used throughout the Trust. They are shown at Board meetings in order to draw those present back to the stories behind the decisions they take.
The October 2015 Care Quality Commission report on the Trust, said: "The trust was one of the first mental health trusts in the country to introduce the patient stories initiative which involved a range of patient stories being used at the trust board meetings for learning and sharing purposes. Patient stories highlighted how services had responded to people’s care and treatment needs. We observed a trust board meeting and saw the powerful nature of starting the formal board meeting with one of these stories."
The stories are used, with personal support from storytellers, in the recruitment process - described in "How can we recruit for compassion" at https://www.hsj.co.uk/home/innovation-and-efficiency/how-we-can-recruit-for-compassion/5065601.article?blocktitle=Resource-Centre&contentID=86
Since the project began, the Trust has seen (amongst other changes) a significant reduction in complaints related to care (45%), to staff issues (9%) and to communication (22%). In addition, perhaps even more interestingly, a big drop in clinical negligence claims (50%).
More importantly, the people who create their stories feel that they are being heard, attended to, respected, and that their opinions and experiences matter.
As a result, the project reached the finalists' stage in the 2013 HSJ Awards in the category 'Innovation in Mental Health'. The stories created by service users have informed and affected staff throughout the Trust. In her 5th March 2014 blog, Michelle Morann, CEO, said: “I was genuinely humbled by the courage of one of our digital patient stories at Board this month.” Listen, Believe, Act - http://www.patientvoices.org.uk/flv/0745pv384.htm inspired her to say: ” What I would say though is that in order to ensure that we can ‘Listen, Believe, Act’, we need everyone to play their part. Before we can improve things, we need to understand what it is that is not working and acknowledge the very difficult and highly pressured circumstances in which staff often find themselves. We need to acknowledge – and applaud – the fact that, despite real difficulties, they continue to put the service user first, keep them safe and manage their recovery.”
The stories can be seen at www.patientvoices.org.uk/dandr.htm