Director of Lived Experience role at NHS on £115K

[ImJustMadAboutSaffron]

www.healthjobsuk.com/job/UK/Staffordshire/Stafford/Midlands_Partnership_NHS_Foundation_Trust/Director/Director-v4828381

What the absolute hell? Words fail me.

But it's only through roles like this that Sarah's experience will be on the radar of decision makers. Knowing the human impact/lived experience of someone who has experienced inadequate care should be foremost in commissioners' minds when services are designed and delivered.

@Chesure or you could enable staff and team managers to make the right decisions based on their first hand knowledge and experience of what's needed, instead of tying them in knots feeding data to Board level with no obvious point.

You see this is exactly why the nhs is stuffed. Perfectly capable people at Ward Manager, Servicre Manager level are quite capable of saying what's needed to meet the needs of their patients. Sadly there's so many layers of bullshit above them by the time it gets to commissioning it's lost all meaning.

Just fund the sensible people with their feet on the ground and cut the crap

That's my lived experience. I left the minute I could taking 40 years of experience with me because the daily bollocks completely wore me out.

Yes, for decades people have thought that it was fine for professionals to speak for the mentally ill, to decide what's best for them and how they should live their lives.

The entire point of "lived experience" is that it's different from "professional experience" and that one cannot substitute for the other.

@FurryDandelionSeekingMissile professionals should be listening to their patients. If they're not, that's the problem.

Uh-huh. And on an individual level, it's important that professionals listen to their patients.

But on an institutional and organisational level, it's not enough for patients' views to only be present insofar as they might or might not filter upwards, via the staff who work directly with them. Firstly, passing on patient experience and opinions isn't really their job, and to do it adequately would take up a lot of time, and secondly, vested interests and professional preconceptions would probably warp those experiences beyond recognition.

The post holder must have experience of a life altering health condition?! That can't be right. So people who could do the job can't apply purely based on not having bad luck in that regard?!

The whole point of 'expert by experience' is that you have lived experience of being a service user. Otherwise you're just another professional.

@FurryDandelionSeekingMissile it that's my point exactly. Empower those who deliver the services to deliver what's needed. Why oh why do you need a director? It's just throw money at a problem and make it way way too far from ground level. It's just unnecessary bollocks

Because if everyone at the top level of designing how services should be structured, what kinds of services should be provided, and how they should be delivered is working from a set of assumptions based on what professionals think needs to be done, where the only representation of the experiences and opinions of mentally ill people is indirectly via the professional experience of people several layers down, then it's likely that services will continue to be as paternalistic and unresponsive to patient needs as they've been in decades past. When it comes to mental health, listening to patients' own priorities, and their explanations of what has and hasn't been helpful and why, is even more essential for structuring services than it is in other areas. It sounds like the trust in question wants to embed this perspective at each level of the service, including director level.

@FurryDandelionSeekingMissile you're suggesting that professionals are making assumptions. If they are, that's the problem. If they're not, then have enough respect to let them get on with it.

You're misreading "assumptions" there @lipstickwoman . There's nothing derogatory about it in that context. You work from a set of assumptions when you do anything at all, including when you set up and run an organisation. Those assumptions might be along the lines of "people want groceries delivered to their homes and are willing to pay a premium for that" or "our purpose here is to make money for our shareholders" or "minimisation of pain is a worthy goal" or just about anything.

When I say that an organisation is "working from a set of assumptions based on what professionals think needs to be done", I mean that their ideas of what the service should be trying to do, and how the service could best do that, are going to be shaped by the experiences and opinions of those who provide mental health services (and though some of those people may additionally have experienced serious mental illness and secondary mental health services themselves, the predominant type of experience and viewpoint being represented will be of the mental health professionals). A service which has "lived experience" workers at every level of the organisation, including at director level, can interrogate the assumptions the organisation is working from, from a different and important perspective.

@FurryDandelionSeekingMissile we need to agree to disagree. I'm an old fashioned nurse, one trained to listen and care. I spent 20 years of a very long career in management posts trying to improve services by listening to (and witnessing) patients needs and struggles. I could sympathise with their frustrations as I felt them myself. I didn't feel listened to either. I've worked with the Board and Commissioning and almost without exception they made the work of the staff harder. Consequently care standards fell.

Thank fully now retired from the crap my beloved NHS has become, I just dread the day I may need it.

“amplifying the voice of those using services within decision-making at all levels of the organisation.”

I’d like to be one of those using health services. If I could get to see a GP, if they’d have time to see me for long enough and listen to my health problems, if they’d refer me for investigations, if I could get treatment.
But we know none of that is going to happen, I’ll spend another year in pain but managers somewhere will be patting themselves on the back at inventing this post ( which sounds like gobbledegook or utter bollocks, which ever you prefer) No wonder Britain is broke.

Well I think this thread should be revisited in 12 months time. I can guarantee that nothing will have changed.

If the mandate of this organisation was to meet the needs of women in the community, it would be absurd to have an all male board of directors.

The mandate is to meet the needs of people with serious mental illness and/or a learning disability and therefore we need to be part of the decision making at every level of service provision.

Survivor activism has existed in mental health for decades and nothing will change until patients are listened to and believed. Look at the recent undercover exposes this year- Dispatches and Panorama. Abuse, neglect, breeches of human rights are rife.
A role like this has huge potential to create much needed culture change and challenge some poorly evidence based understandings of psychological pain and distress. There is growing evidence of its utility and its potential to improve quality and safety of care delivered.

I think many of the people mocking and sneering don't understand how mental health trusts work, wouldn't be aware of peer work, service user and carer involvement, coproduction etc.

The mocking and sneering is what's irking me Beauty.

TBH I can understand a reluctant to fund new director positions at a time when funds are so stretched. I share the scepticism about whether change will truly be made based on "lived experience" input, when they don't even listen to staff. And I know that, to someone outside the sector, the phrase "lived experience" is a bit "huh? isn't that a tautology?" (I'm not fond of the terminology myself).

But even when several people have come on the thread explaining that the (admittedly vague-sounding) phrase means something specific in this context, something which is important to an extremely disadvantaged group in society, and explaining why this concept is especially important for this group due to a long history of institutional abuse and oppression, you still get people making their smart little comments about their "lived experience" of being a nurse or having crap maternity care or whatever random thing they want to make a point with, or saying that it probably means they want to hire someone with blue hair, a gender identity and a pretend disability, or saying any idiot could do this work, or arguing that lived experience roles are intrinsically discriminatory against those who don't have a serious disability.

*a reluctance

Yes Furry I am in complete agreement with all you say here. And it doesn't feel too dissimilar to the sneering that many experience at the hands of services, perhaps making it more painful to witness.

Yes, as someone who has been supported by those with lived experience and who now works in the same role, the ignorance is hurtful. And to suggest that peer work isn't needed because there's PALS or the friends and family survey is so far off the mark.

By all means quibble director salaries as a whole, but don't dismiss a whole branch of support because you don't understand it. Would people even dare do that in any other speciality than mental health? Would they call for endocrinology to be refunded because they don't understand it?

I am a senior nurse and I am glad to see this post being advertised at this level. Directors sit on the hospital boards and have strategic oversight and clout to implement real change. Someone with this kind of experience should be valued.

And here's me directing my own lived experience for £0 😶

It’s also a hard thing to do well, and not just pay lip service to.

All those of us who are female have experienced ‘significant power imbalances’. - look at the maternity services. Which are dependent on finding more staff, more midwives, for which better pay and conditions are needed. But somehow that’s never what’s in mind is it.

Everything needs to go back to basics in Britain; actually start looking at needs of the population and the practical services needed to cover those. We don’t need more politically correct nonsense creating more word salads and make-work in meetings. It’s all just jobs for the boys instead.