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People with lived experience

Service User and Carer Reference Group

Think Ahead’s Service User and Carer Reference Group  was established in November 2014. The members of the group provide us with a wealth of knowledge, experience, and invaluable advice, and their input fundamentally shapes our work. 

We believe it is crucial to involve people with lived experience of mental health problems, and accessing mental health services, in all our work – to ensure that the needs of service users and carers are represented and reflected in everything we do.

Think Ahead’s role in training mental health social workers of the future offers the opportunity to embed the service user/carer perspective and co-production in their training and future practice. The role of Service User and Carer Reference Group is to help shape and support that process, including acting as advisory forum to Think Ahead, contributing to the development and improvement of the programme leading to wider impact on services and better outcomes for service users and carers. We regularly seek feedback from members and aim to continuously improve the way we involve service users and carers.

Contributions of our Service User and Carer Reference Group

Since the group’s creation, members have been involved in the following:

  • Designing our approach to participant recruitment and assessment, and involvement as service user assessors at our assessment centres.
  • The programme’s academic curriculum and involvement in facilitating workshops as well as assessing and moderating role plays at the Summer Institute in July-August. Other involvement includes contributing to a video repository on different topics and teaching days.
  • Consultation on the different aspects of our programme such as our brand, communications and organisational strategy, diversity and inclusion work and more.
  • Presentations or speaking as part of a panel at events such as our recruitment events, Cohort Launch Event and conferences.

To find out more about what it’s like to be a part of the Service User and Carer Reference Group, take a look at this article written by Caroline, one of the group’s members.

Our membership for the Service User and Carer Reference Group is currently full. We won’t be able to accept new members at this time. 

Please get in touch with any questions