Healthwatch B&Nes Volunteer, Catherine Shaw shares her volunteering story
Why I volunteered for Healthwatch B&NES
When I joined Healthwatch B&NES two years ago, I was also starting a part-time Masters degree with the Open University called ‘Advancing Healthcare Practice’.
The motivation for both was the same; after 8 years of working on NHS-funded voluntary sector support services, previous work in mental health support and as a home carer and having faced my own health challenges, I had seen where the health and social care system did and did not work for people and I wanted to contribute to change and improvement.
How Healthwatch B&NES has helped me personally
As a person who has had social anxiety issues all her life, I’ve always experienced a conflict between wanting to share my thoughts and contribute and feeling inhibited about doing so.
It’s always a lot easier for me to write things down but it’s when we show up and are heard that we convey our passion and our energy regarding health and social care, that people listen and take note and even change perspective or direction.
How Healthwatch B&NES has helped me academically
In this, my third and final year of my studies, I need to choose one health improvement project.
One option is to focus on a skill improvement. I’ve chosen to look at how to become a more effective Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) representative in the context of Healthwatch B&NES. I know for some ‘online’ is a ‘door closing’, but for me, it feels like an opportunity to experiment with my participation and speaking up.
One of the chief ways we contribute as Healthwatch volunteers is via the medium of our voices, by speaking up and participating.
The challenges of being a Patient and Public involvement volunteer
I’m very conscious that we have a lot of years of experience within our ranks with regards to representing Healthwatch and possibly its antecedents eg. Community Health Council.
As part of my project, I would really like to be able to speak to as many volunteers as possible about what it is to be a Patient and Public Involvement representative in meetings and to gather their reflections on what they have learnt about how to tackle the role over time.
It certainly seems to me that there are some unique challenges – for instance, what exactly their role is in a given situation and how to be heard and taken seriously, as well as the skills that anyone participating in a meeting needs to draw on and develop.
One of the tutors on the course is on her local Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) board and she said that she saw the contribution of lay members as ‘invaluable’. I’m wondering what different elements are required to make ‘an invaluable contribution’ in this area. I’m sure that one of them is to ‘do your homework’ before showing up.
Future actions and aspirations
I’m going to take on the RUH link volunteer role and join the Executive Board. This gives me a chance to start giving things more of a go whilst simultaneously conducting my enquiries into what it means to be effective and become more effective in such roles for the purposes of the course.
I hope I can speak more about this in person and that it may be of help to others in some way as well as to myself.
