Service user feedback within Prison settings

My name is Rachael Burley, Cluster Manager and Service User Involvement Lead for Inclusion under Midlands Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust. Inclusion mainly provides substance misuse services and some mental health support to prisoners across 27 prisons in Yorkshire, Derbyshire, the Midlands, Thames Valley and Isle of Wight. Inclusion have been using Care Opinion for many year now as a way of gathering service user feedback across substance misuse services, sexual health services and Thurrock services including IAPT & Psychological services.

Gathering feedback within the prison setting can be particularly challenging and in the past we have mainly asked for feedback via questionnaires. I was tasked with implementing Care Opinion across all our Health in Justice (HiJ) sites, which was challenging as Care Opinion is an 'online' feedback platform and the service users do not have access to the internet. We worked closely with the support team at Care Opinion and their safeguarding lead to develop some robust guidance for both staff and services users to help them understand what Care Opinion is an how they can feedback about the services that have been provided by Inclusion.

We encourage our service users to complete the Care Opinion freepost feedback leaflets in order to have their say and share their story about their experience with Inclusion. These feedback leaflets get sent back to Care Opinion via Royal Mail and then they get entered by the Care Opinion team onto the site and moderated and published in the usual way. Due to the nature of the setting Care Opinion were able to offer us an extra level of safety by using careful moderation advisories so all HiJ feedback gets looked at by senior moderators prior to publication.

As the service user involvement lead, part of our strategy involved using platforms to gain feedback from people who use our service so the plan was to subscribe all of the HiJ services to Care Opinion. Each manager and SUI lead is named as a responder, they have welcome information from Care Opinion and a teams call with myself to go through everything. When staff in HiJ sites are introduced to Care Opinion I think people feel slightly unsure because historically everything about prisons is kept within prisons, but when I share with them how it gives our services users a chance to tell their story, anonymously, that we can see feedback, respond to feedback, and share feedback with others they love it!

Here is how some of the staff feel about Care Opinion:

Care Opinion feedback at HMP Swinfen Hall gave the team a boost in terms of team morale. They appreciated the feedback and the fact that it was displayed externally to the prison made them feel like it was more meaningful. They like that it is a way of sharing feedback to people outside of the establishment.

As a team at HMP Spring Hill, we have found that the care opinion forms offer an opportunity for service users to capture a lot more of their journey - feedback tends to be more detailed and encapsulates multiple aspects of service that people have encountered. We always print out both the feedback and the response which enables our service users to see how their feedback has been responded to. This is something unique to care opinion and isn't typically something that happens with any of our other feedback mechanisms.

One of the biggest challenges is probably ensuring the feedback loop is closed. The feedback is anonymous so unless they share with teams what they have written prior to sending then we don’t know who has left the feedback – a way to combat this and our way of closing the feedback loop is to share Care Opinion Feedback on our notice boards. And where possible print out for the service user.

Prisoners like to be able to share their story. I also think they like to show their gratitude and sometimes by sharing a positive story this is one of the ways they can do this to balance that they also like to be able to say what can be improved and again this is a good safe space to be able to do that.

One service user told us:

It is beneficial to me and others to share part of my situation and lived experience. Being in jail it is good to know that we are being heard

To date we have had 265 stories shared from the prisoners in just over a year, which is incredible. These stories have been read publicly over 6,000 times 94% of the stories shared have been entirely positive. I think the stories and the number of stories speak for themselves.

Our aspirations going forward is to grow Care Opinion within HiJ, to some sites it is still in its infancy and although we are receiving many stories we can still utilize and promote this platform even further.