People with learning disabilities advise FitzRoy

At FitzRoy, we encourage the people we support to have an active say on the services they receive. That’s why we trained some of the people we support to become FitzRoy Quality Advisors.

FitzRoy Quality Advisors are experts by experience. They go and visit our services across the country and interview people that use them to find out what they think about the support they receive from FitzRoy. They then report their findings to our Quality Managers to give them a valuable and independent insight into the quality of our services.

We got the chance to talk to Malcolm, one of FitzRoy’s Quality Advisors. Here’s what he thinks about his role in his own words.

What do you do as a Quality Advisor?

I have a question sheet that I take and I ask people what they think about their service and write down their answers.”

What do you enjoy most about being a Quality Advisor?

I’m really enjoying the travelling. I enjoy going to different places and seeing how they are run.”

What did you learn in your training?

I learnt the correct way to ask questions and the different situations we could come up against for instance someone might not understand you, so you have to think of another way to ask a question.

The best thing I have learnt is ways to communicate with different people who have different needs. One person might be able to talk like me and you are, or some people might use sign language.”

We also spoke to Kirsty Millward, FitzRoy Quality Manager, to tell us more about Malcolm in his role.

Malcolm has now visited a few FitzRoy locations as have other Quality Advisors.

His contribution to FitzRoy through his Quality Advisor role has meant that the FitzRoy services he’s visited have been able to celebrate their successes and work on areas of improvement identified by his visit and Quality Advisor interviews.

For some people having someone who’s not a staff member to listen to their views has been invaluable and they have opened up with their feedback.

Malcolm has recently completed a visit to a FitzRoy location. There, he interviewed a number of people and made some practice observations. He then collated the main points to celebrate and / or improve to feedback to the service.

Malcolm’s confidence to complete the Quality Advisor role has developed over time and he is now able to conduct more visits unsupervised which is fantastic.”