Guest blog

Having our say at the Papworth Trust Forum
14/05/2012

Papworth Trust's Forum is a meeting for people who use our services. The Forum gives people a chance to tell Papworth Trust about what is important to them, hear about what is happening at Papworth Trust and share ideas to improve the services they use.

The latest Forum was on Wednesday 9 May. Everyone who came to the Forum wrote this blog together to tell other people about it.


These are some of the things we talked about at the Forum:

We had the opportunity to bounce ideas off each other and talked about lots of different issues to do with Papworth Trust, including:

  • How Papworth Trust tries to make things fair for everyone and how to make things better and fairer in the organisation.
  • The new names for Papworth Trust's services: My Care, My Home, My Leisure, My Work and My Services.
  • The blog and how we can use it.
  • How we can get involved and have our say.

We also talked about things we want to change:

  • We think we need more staff to support us so that there is always someone available to cover a session at the centres.
  • Papworth Trust should do more things in all areas.

We asked people who they met at the Forum and they told us:

"New service user group representatives."
"Old and new friends."
"Lots of people from different places."
"I met and chatted to a Trustee and Trustee User Reps."
"We got to meet the Trustee User Representatives and staff - that was good."

These are some of the ideas we came up with at the Forum:

  • Having a credit card sized card with Papworth Trust's useful numbers for us to carry around.
  • Making sure there is feedback to groups and Trustee User Reps when people have raised issues at the Forum.
  • People need to be trained to use sign language.
  • We need to know what volunteers can do.
  • Getting more staff so we can do more would be good.
  • Could we invite speakers to future Forums?
  • We should have a comments section on the blog so people can raise things they want to talk about at the Forum.

There was lots of information for Trustee User Representatives to deal with!

We asked people what they liked about the day and they said:

"We got to ask queries and found out things we didn't know about."
"Nice, friendly people."
"It was interesting."
"It helps service users."
"Everyone was involved."
"I also liked talking in groups."
"Drawings to help things make sense."
"We liked the acting."
"Taking photos."
"I liked learning about the new changes."
"Nice venue, Age UK."
"The lunch, especially the cakes!"
"I would like to come again."

We asked people what they did not like and they told us:

"Sometimes I could not hear what other people were saying."
"Everything was good."
"We didn't run quite to time but that can be a good thing if something good comes of it."

Thank you very much to Paul, Lucy, Alison, Tammy, Emma, Neil, Stacey, Matthew, Georgina, Sarah, Daniel, Rob, Lisa, Brett, Ronnie, Maria, Letitea, Margaret, Josh, Sam, Joanna, Nina and Adela for helping to write this blog!

The next Forum will be in Cambridge on 5 July. If you use a Papworth Trust service and you would like to come to a Forum, please contact Revonnia Gwewera at revonnia.gwewera@papworth.org.uk or phone 01480 357200.