Our current position

What are we doing now?

This strategy replaces the Trust’s Community Engagement Strategy which has now expired.

KMPT has a good record of engaging with service users and carers within the planning and monitoring of its services. We acknowledge that there is currently a wide range of engagement activity taking place across the Trust.

Whilst we celebrate staff’s commitment to involving service users and carers in our current projects, it is acknowledged that there is no standardisation of training, support or supervision for service user and carers who participate in Trust business and some of the activities take place are not captured centrally. It has been suggested that this lack of structure may be hindering the recruitment and retention of service users and carers who may want to work with us.

With this in mind, we have agreed four key themes that we are keen to address to help us achieve our vision: recruitment, training and support, communication and marketing and process and practical issues.

The Trust is committed to ensuring that service users and carers continue to be involved in all aspects of Trust business but also to ensure that they feel supported, valued and empowered to do so.

We have used the concept of the Engagement Onion, taken from the Wellcome Trust, as a tool to demonstrate the diversity of engagement activities and the varying levels of involvement with service user and carers. The core represents true co-production and as the layers move away from the core, the engagement activities move from collaboration, to consultation and then to informing.

In order to inform this strategy, a mapping exercise was undertaken with Patient Experience Leads from each care group to understand the engagement activities that are currently being undertaken across the Trust. Through this exercise it became apparent that each care group engage with their service users and carers differently due to the varying nature of the patients they support. Care group specific engagement onions have also been developed.

Trust wide engagement onion

This diagram illustrates the high level Trust Wide activity that is currently undertaken by KMPT. It is our ambition to ensure that much of our engagement activity moves toward the centre of the onion, towards the collaboration and co-production layers. Each care group was tasked with undertaking this mapping exercise. The care group specific onions can be found in Appendix A.