East Sussex Community Voice has been developing a Young Inspectors Programme, to gather these views and help shape services, drawing on the experiences and views of young people. Work on this started in late 2013 and a team is now in place. 

Healthwatch East Sussex will utilise the work and stories these young inspectors gather throughout the year, to provide the basis for a strong voice for young people across the county.

From people who use learning disability services:
Healthwatch East Sussex, through its partner framework was keen to involve service user in the quality checking of services they use.

We started to explore how the Q Kit model could be rolled out across services outside of those residential services provided by Southdown Housing. We have commissioned the Q Team to pilot six visits to test this out this model of collecting consumer feedback as part of our ‘Enter and View’ activity.

The Q-Kit is a quality checking tool designed in partnership with people with learning disabilities and its focus is to ask questions that enable service users to focus on what contributes to good support and therefore a good life. It can be used to assess the quality aspects of support services that are of most importance to service users.  

We will be using this in the coming year when we begin to visit services and the outcomes from these visits will be available in early summer 2014. 

The partnership work we have started with Southdown Housing, will help local commissioners have a greater understanding of what good support looks like as described by people who use those services and what is most important to them. This will inform future service planning. 

This work will also be valuable to the work of the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

As the relevant regulatory body, reports of these visits will inform their inspection work. 

For more information visit: www.southdownhousing.org