Service user (SU) and carer involvement is crucial to healthcare planning, development and improvement. Evaluating how involvement is carried out is important to improve the quality and impact of these activities, and the experiences of everyone involved. Using the 4Pi National Involvement Standards as a framework to guide evaluation can help ensure involvement is carried out in a systematic and comprehensive way.
Project aim
In this study, we are developing and testing a new questionnaire to evaluate SUs and carers’ experiences of involvement at South London and Maudsley (SLaM) NHS Foundation Trust.
Service user (SU) and carer involvement is crucial to planning, developing and improving healthcare. Evaluating SU and carer experiences of involvement is important, to gain a better understanding of what is done well and not so well. Doing so will improve the quality and impact of these activities, and the experiences of everyone involved.
In order to develop an evaluation that is itself drawn from lived experience, systematic, and that will be applicable to a broad range of areas and sectors, this study aims to design a questionnaire grounded in the 4Pi National Involvement Standards.
The 4Pi National Involvement Standards, developed by the National Survivor User Network (NSUN), describes a set of standards for good practice, and to monitor and evaluate involvement. 4Pi stands for:
- Principles - How do we relate to each other?
- Purpose - Why are we involving people?
- Presence - Who is involved?
- Process - How are people involved?
- Impact - What difference does involvement make?
Key objectives
- To co-develop a new 4Pi-based questionnaire with SUs and carers to evaluate their experiences of involvement.
- To test the 4Pi-based questionnaire, to understand how well the questions work.
- To put together a final version of the 4Pi questionnaire that is ready for use.
How the questionnaire will be developed
The questionnaire will be developed in an iterative way, involving a series review and modification steps. Both subject-matter experts and SUs and carers will inform these efforts. A workshop will also be carried out with SUs and carers to ‘test’ the questionnaire, which means getting a better understanding of how well the questions are understood and how meaningful the answers are. The questionnaire will then be modified based on this feedback, to produce a final version that is ready for use.
Potential impact
Our aim is for this new 4Pi framework-based questionnaire to be used at SLaM, King’s Health Partners and beyond, to facilitate a more robust evaluation of SU and carer involvement. Ultimately, this will enable the involvement process to be better understood, so that good practice can be more widely shared and celebrated, and challenges can be better identified and overcome.
Collaborators
Mr Richard Morton (Service User and Carer Involvement Lead, Improvement Service, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust)
Meet the project team
Erin Letbe-Holder
Patient and public involvement coordinator, King's Improvement Science, King's College London
