Patient Opinion Launch Event in Sligo

Both a warm welcome from Sligo-Leitrim Mental Health services and a successful two days working with staff, talking to patients, users and carers. Thanks to Joanne, the Patient Opinion lead for Sligo and all her colleagues for all the arrangements made.

An overview of the highlights, plus some pointers for taking this forward. There was a good attendance at the launch event itself, held at the Clarion Hotel in Sligo on Wednesday 30th November. The mix of staff from across Sligo as well as neighbouring HSE Areas plus representation from smaller providers, patients, users and carers, led to some interesting discussions. Tomas the Area Director of Nursing, set out the commitments to transparency and giving the public a voice, which are the key motivators for this work. Sinead , a local peer support worker gave us some heartfelt and powerful reflections on patient experiences.

I then gave a talk introducing Patient Opinion, its values, aims and functionality, before moving on to the specific work with Sligo-Leitrim mental health services. If people want to see the slides from the day, they are now on the Patient Opinion site HERE.  As well as the launch event we fitted in a productive workshop talking to patients and carers using day services in Sligo, generating a good number of stories. Do have a look at the feedback generated HERE. The closing remarks at the launch focused on a call to action for staff, users and carers to get involved with generating and responding to stories. This was followed up the next morning by a workshop with local managers focusing on both responding to and generating postings in their services.  

There are some great stories already on the site.  Take a look at this word cloud:

We have now embedded the Take Your Story form on the site so that people can print out this simple form to collect feedback. You can access it HERE.

Big thanks once again to all the staff for their efforts moving this forward.  Do please contact me with any questions or queries at  tim.hunt@patientopinion.org.uk .