Making Our Voices Heard works in partnership with the Black Country Partnership Foundation Trust to ensure that patient voices and experiences are heard in their services.

We carry out Quality of Life audits in a range of their services including:

• Penrose acute assessment unit for people with learning disabilities
• The Gerry Simon low secure unit for men with learning disabilities
• Newton House step down unit for men with learning disabilities
• Edward Street Hospital for older people with mental health issues; and
• The Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) Hallam Street Hospital for adults with mental health issues.

All of the audits are led by people with learning disabilities and by people who have experience of using mainstream mental health services; some of the auditors have learning disabilities and other have used mainstream services.  The services are all audited against person centered quality standards that are specifically written for each individual service.

Following each audit an action plan for improvement is developed. The Quality Auditors feed back their findings to the Trust’s Quality Assurance Group, the Quality Council and the Executive Group in the Trust to ensure the improvements are made.

The Patients Council

We support patients in the Gerry Simon Clinic to run their own Patients Council. The Patient Council is made up of all patients in the clinic and is always very well attended. The Council meets every month to tackle the issues that affect them as people with a learning disability, a mental health issue and as patients in a secure environment. Some of the work the Patients Council does links in to both Sandwell and Wolverhampton People’s Parliament. The Council’s invite professionals from Black Country Partnership Foundation Trust to their meetings to work with them to resolve any issues they have raised.

The Patients Council also carry out their own quality audits of their own clinic to ensure the issues they feel are most important to them are being looked at and addressed.

The Patients Council have carried work including, patient led audits, producing a Charter of Rights that has been signed off by the Chairperson of the Trust (Bob Piper) and the Chief Executive of the Trust (Karen Dowman). They have also made significant changes to the complaints process, made the seclusion policy easy to read and looked at health issues for people in secure settings.

We also support patients in Penrose House to self-advocate through their community meetings to make sure that people understand their rights.

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