Barking and Dagenham Experts by Experience

PROJECT CLOSED

We are very proud to be able to share with you What are we, Who are we, What we do and Why this work is of great importance.

Who are we?

We are CIIIL, We work with the Care Quality Commission (CQC). CQC are responsible for looking at the whole picture of adult social care in England. They regulate inspect and review all adult care services Public, private, and voluntary. CQC have inspectors who go from service to service rating them on how they perform against the guidelines that are set out by our Government. They cover all sorts of services such as,

Older people services
Learning Disability services
Mental Health services
Domiciliary care services
Physical and sensory impairment services

We at CIIIL work with CQC by organising experts with learning difficulties or experts with experience using domiciliary care services, to accompany the CQC inspector who is inspecting a service or home and talk to the individuals living or using the services in person. The questions asked by our experts go towards the final report submitted by CQC to evaluate a service.

What is an Expert?

Experts by Experience are people from Barking and Dagenham who have used the services we are inspecting in the past. Making them an expert as they have experienced living or using this type of service. Note our experts never inspect services in the own borough. Our experts come from a range of diverse cultural backgrounds and are of all ages, gay, straight, they have different impairments, disabilities and are from various religions.

Why does this work?

The inspectors from CQC do a great job, however people who use the services are able to talk openly and differently to the Expert by Experience and this makes them feel valued. The Experts by Experience background knowledge of using services enables them to ask different questions and explore different themes they are able to pick up and note details, such as care practices, accessibility, interaction, choices given to the users and communication between staff and service users.
The key findings from our experts work

As they improve services for people who use them
The People who use the service feel they are listened to
Mental Health services
The Service providers and managers get a different honest perspective
The Experts by Experience can use their experience to help others, and they feel they really make a difference

Our project began back in 2006, and we very proud of all of our Experts by Experience both with Learning difficulties and our domiciliary care service users. We ensure that every precaution is taken to match the correct Experts to each inspection. Our Experts are not Volunteers, they get paid for each inspection that they take part in. They get to travel all over the country, never alone as we always organise a Support worker to accompany our Experts with learning difficulties and many friendships have been forged. Most of our Experts will tell you the best part of their job is meeting so many different types of people and knowing they really are making a difference too.