Midlands Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust’s (MPFT) vision for co-production and involvement is to enable everybody who uses our services the opportunity to have their voices heard, influence decisions that affect them, and recognise the benefits of working together.

This vision has been embraced by BeeU, MPFT’s Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) in Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin, where a small group of staff explored how co-production could be established to offer greater impact within the service. This led to the creation of the BeeU Ambassador role - empowering volunteers to help to make real and sustainable change.

Former service user Rosie Jones was approached to become an ambassador due to her extensive lived experience of BeeU services. She was referred in 2018 and accessed support from several teams, resulting in being assigned a psychologist who Rosie says “was super helpful and really helped me to change my life around”.

Discharged from the service in 2022, she was keen to take the opportunity to inform how services are shaped for the future: “My experience of BeeU had been very rocky. I really wanted to be an ambassador because I wanted to use my experience for the good of other children and young people.

“Making sure that a service is shaped with young people, that people with lived experience are involved with creating processes, definitely helps professionals to learn. You can't get everything from data; lived experience is really beneficial in presenting a more human and empathetic approach. It's good for professionals to have a past service user perspective to sense check things, and to make sure that the young people's voices are heard. It can also help reduce the stigma and enhance young people’s trust in the service.”

As well as benefitting the service, Rosie feels the ambassador role brings her a great sense of purpose and fulfilment: “Being an ambassador is definitely rewarding. It gives me a sense of purpose and what I went through is being used for something positive, that can be helpful to other young people; it's not just all a bad memory.”

Rosie has recently graduated with a business management degree from the University of Bath and is due to start a law conversion course, with the goal of becoming a solicitor. The ambassador role has helped her to develop skills that are helpful in her study and future career: “Working as a team with the other ambassadors and professionals has improved my teamworking skills and my communication and confidence too. I am really interested in clinical negligence, where I can continue using my lived experience to help others.”

Alongside Rosie, ambassadors Ashley Davies, Fearne Finnigan and Georgia Nicholls make up the team who meet monthly with BeeU staff members Stuart Farley (Applied Psychologist), Ryan Groves (Peer Support Worker) and Jessica Roose (Quality, Governance & Participation Lead), with support from Sonia Kinnair (Senior Peer Involvement and Co-Production Facilitator) to contribute to making positive change through critical evaluation and improvement of services.

Projects completed to date include a review of communication and language used by clinicians, in service letters and leaflets to evaluate how the use of language can make a young person feel, and workshops with BeeU’s assessment team to look at ways to support young people while they await an assessment.

Rosie hopes to continue in her ambassador role to work on improving communication between BeeU teams, to make receiving care in multiple areas a more seamless process.

In recognition of their outstanding contribution to improving services and helping the Trust achieve its mission of making life better for its communities, the ambassadors were crowned winners of the Lived Experience Representative of the Year Award at the Trust’s Brilliant You Awards in November.

Co-production will be at the heart of a brand new CAMHS service in Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin being launched by MPFT in April, and presents an exciting opportunity for the ambassadors and others to shape services going forwards. Read more about the new service here: New CAMHS Service Model Awarded to MPFT.

Stuart is proud of the role the ambassadors have played so far in helping to shape CAMHS services and is excited for the future: “Co-production allows us to really hear the voice of the people we serve and take actions to grow and improve our offer from it.

“It is very rewarding for all involved. Our ambassadors are passionate and keen to contribute using their lived experience to improve services for other children, young people and families. For clinicians, it brings a sense of adventure, an unknown journey to go on together. Ideas are shaped by a shared vision for improvement - it’s good to remove any perceived hierarchy and work together on the same level.

“The goal is to have an ambassador for each of the specialist areas within the service, and ideally a dedicated staff member to lead on co-production, so that it becomes a natural everyday process to allow us to embed learning to inform the next generation.”

The Trust has also recently launched its five-year Co-production, Lived Experience and Community Voice Strategy (CLEVES). We want people who use our services, our staff, and community partners to work together as equals to improve what we do. Find out more here: CLEVES: Midlands Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust.