Involving service users and carers in social work education can bring to life the teaching for students. It can give them a real sense of the role they can have in people’s lives once they are qualified. For many students, this will be their first interaction with service users and carers.
Meeting service users during training can help students to see that they have common ground with service users. It can help them to see that service users have skills and strengths and that they can move beyond their status as users of services. It can change students’ attitudes, helping them to lose any previously-held steretypes or prejudices.
‘This was one of the most interesting and informative sessions so far. It was useful to be able to ask questions and develop some understanding of how to phrase questions to service users. It gave a good overview of a possible real situation we may face as social workers.’
I thought it was very useful to have carers’ insights and I felt by hearing about their experiences it made the things I had been reading and learning more real.’
It is clear from our course reviews that students really value the learning they acquire from teaching sessions that include service users and carers.
Every time we do something with students, the feedback is always positive. They say that getting the information ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’ as it were, gives them a better insight into the needs of users.
- Common Aims a strategy to support service user involvement
- Assessing Students Readiness to Practise
- Audio podcasts from SWEP Conference
- Beyond tokenism
- Book on involving Service Users and Carers
- Building user and carer involvement
- Carer Aware e-learning course – FREE
- Carers and confidentiality Guidelines
- Carers and their rights
- Carers as experts in training professionals
- Carers as Partners
- Carers stories from the Carers’ Resource, Harrogate, Craven and Airedale
- Citizen Involvement in Social Work in the Northern Ireland
- Confidentiality and Information Sharing
- Creating a service user and carer centre on the virtual learning environments (VLEs)
- Dancing to Our Own Tunes
- Definitions Service User and User Controlled
- Developing emotional intelligence
- Developing User Involvement
- Discrimination Prohibited
- Do you come here often
- Does He Take Sugar
- Doing it for ourselves
- Effective engagement
- Effective Engagement for Service Users and Carers
- Family poverty in the UK
- Getting to Grips with Participation
- Growing spaces as a way of understanding and developing genuine partnerships
- Higher Education Academy Website
- Higher Education Academy Website
- How I live with my Alzheimer
- How I went from social worker to service user
- How to avoid benefit pitfalls where payments are made by a university
- Impact of patient confidentiality
- Increasing Opportunities for Coproduction and Personalisation
- Involvement Case study Anglia Ruskin University
- Involvement Case study Kingston and St George’s University
- Involvement Case study University of Leeds
- Involvement Northern Ireland Context
- Involving People Who Use Services
- Jobs in Social Work
- Knowledge exchange
- List of videos produced by service users and carers
- Living and learning together conference report
- Looking after ourselves
- Making Events Accessible
- Making It Real Conference Interviews Video
- Making It Real Conference Video of Interviews in Transcript
- Making It Real Video of interviews from Conference
- Meeting carers rights
- Member of Parliament meets service users shaping social work education
- Mental Capacity Act training tool launched
- Model Payment Policy for Service Users and Carers
- New Book Social Care Service Users & User Involvement
- Newly Qualified Social Workers
- On the receiving end
- Personal Holocaust
- Photos from SWEP conference
- Practice benchmarking study
- Raising Awareness of Access Issues
- Recruiting and Retaining Social Workers
- Reflections on Involvement
- Report from University of Plymouth Service User and Carer Group
- Role of Development Workers in Promotion
- Service User and Carer Project Worker
- Service user and carer workshop discussion and findings
- Service Users and Carers involved in health
- Shaping Our Lives report
- Sheffield Carers Voices
- Skills for Care conference – Social work: building the workforce together
- Social Work Inclusion Group
- Social Work Inclusion Group Talking Heads Video
- Store and manage social policy work and resources
- Supporting Involvement
- SWEP Making it Real Conference Report
- Taking Wellbeing forward theory and practice
- The Impact of Suicide on Others
- The Madness and Literature Network
- The Meaningful Involvement of Service Users and Carers.
- Toolkit Designed by Service User and Carer
- Transfer of Social Worker registration from the GSCC to the HCPC
- Useful Documents when working with Carers or for Carers Themselves
- User and carer involvement in education – MHHE (Mental Health in Higher Education) reading list
- User involvement in health and social care education – a concept analysis
- Using poetry to develop learning materials
- Valuing Involvement
- Video presentation by Peter Beresford
- Voices of experience
- Walk This Way
- We are more than our story
- What is public engagement in Higher Education?
- What We Bring
- When Services Fail
- You can influence the quality of healthcare education