The work that the Regional Partnership Board is doing to improve services for carers has begun to gather speed. During the past few weeks, Hawis Jones who is leading on behalf of the partners on developing, managing and co-ordinating the programme has been spending time getting to know people who work in the field e.g. providers of support services, lead officers in the councils and Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board as well as representatives of national organisations e.g. Carers Trust and Carers Wales. During this time also the Regional Leadership Board has agreed on the direction for the work: we wish to look at services for carers in North Wales through the eyes of carers in order to understand what is important for them. We want to demonstrate that we acknowledge and truly value what they are doing through their caring role and want to listen to them in order to improve services and understand what will help them to continue with their caring responsibilities and to support them to live their lives as they would like to.
For the next few weeks, the partners will focus on completing two pieces of work, namely:
1) Gathering the stories and experiences of carers. We will enable carers to share in three different ways, namely in written form, through audio recordings or through interviews. This will also add to the Population Needs Assessment work which has already been carried out.
2) We will map the investment and the services that are currently available for carers. This work will help us to see whether our services are aligned with what carers say matters to them, and will make sure that we ensure the greatest benefit of the resources that we have.
If anyone has other ideas that would be useful with this work, then we would very much like to hear from you.
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