Our Vision for Involvement

We recently developed a five year strategy detailing our vision for meaningful involvement of service users and stakeholders at Oxfordshire Mind. The strategy was developed through consultation with service users with lived experience of mental health, and Oxfordshire Mind staff members.

Involvement strategy mission statement

As part of the involvement strategy we developed the following mission statement:

“Oxfordshire Mind will embed the involvement of service users and stakeholders at all levels within the organisation, aiming always for a co-productive approach.  Oxfordshire Mind aims to ensure that all involvement is recovery and wellbeing focused, is inclusive, is meaningful, and has a positive impact.”

Involvement values

The values which underpin this mission statement are:

1. We will ensure involvement opportunities are recovery and wellbeing focused.

All involvement opportunities will help support the recovery and wellbeing of service users and stakeholders and are not purely for the benefit of the organisation.  The opportunities will provide service users with an opportunity to learn, broaden their experience, develop new skills and build confidence. We will ensure that service users and stakeholders have training and development opportunities available to them to ensure they are fully informed and empowered in their roles. 

2. We will ensure involvement is the norm and will be meaningful.

Service users and stakeholders have the right to be involved in the organisation, and this should automatically be built into the ways Oxfordshire Mind staff work.  Oxfordshire Mind recognises that meaningful and high-quality involvement involves more advance planning and staff time, and will ensure this is given to prevent involvement from becoming tokenistic.

3. We will see service users and stakeholders as experts.

The existing experience, knowledge and skills of service users and stakeholders should be valued and seen as expert knowledge, even though they may be different to those of professionals in the organisations. We will embrace a staff member’s personal lived experience of mental health problems and caring as valuable expert knowledge.   

4. We will ensure service users and stakeholders decide the level of involvement they want.

Service users and stakeholders have the right to decide what involvement opportunities they would like to be involved in.  Service users and stakeholders have the right to say that they do not want to be involved in involvement opportunities. 

5. We will ensure that we address barriers to involvement opportunities and actively promote diversity.

We will ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to take part in involvement opportunities in a way that suits them.  We will ensure that all involvement opportunities are made accessible to minority groups, those with disabilities and access needs, and different age ranges (such as children and young people, and older adults).  We will also ensure that involvement opportunities are accessible to service users and stakeholders who live across Oxfordshire. 

6. Benefits of Involvement.

Benefits of Involvement: There are multiple benefits to embedding involvement in a co-productive manner within the organisation.

• For service users and stakeholders, it is linked with better outcomes, improved self-esteem, confidence and satisfaction with services.
• At a service level, it provides new perspectives, strengthens relationships between staff and service users, improves the quality of the service, and ensures the services closely reflect the views and priorities of service users and stakeholders. 
• At a community level, it strengthens community resilience, increases the skills, capacities and confidence of members of the community and enables voices of marginalised service users to be heard and influence service development.

Get involved

Want to get involved? We’re always looking for existing service users to support and improve our work at Oxfordshire Mind.