Claire Curtis visited Mainstay Trust in Glasgow to see how asking “what matters to you?” helps empower people with learning and physical disabilities.
As part of ‘What matters to you?’ day 2018 I visited the activities at Mainstay Trust Ltd., a Glasgow-based charity offering a range of support services to people with a learning or physical disability. For 2018 they held a ‘What matters to you?’ day for their service users and staff. When I arrived I was handed a timetable, brought into the main area to meet service users and staff.
The people using the service had been completing ‘What matters to you?’ conversation sheets with their support workers to help identify what they liked about the service and what could make it even better for them. The art group had used some of this information to make a display with what matters to them and it was covering the walls along with lots of photographs and information about activities held at Mainstay.
All the information from the ‘What matters to you?’ conversations was read out to the service users and staff and discussed what they could build on to the things that mattered to people into their day with Mainstay Trust.
There were lots of suggestions of new things people would like to try and then it was the service’s turn to try and make these happen! There were stalls providing information on some of the things that people had asked for, like learning tennis at Kelvingrove Tennis Club, or trying new activities at Glasgow Eagles Disability Sports Club.
As well as information on new activities the service users had asked for other things to help them build their own skills so Mainstay Trust were holding training workshops in the afternoon on cookery skills and fire safety.
They also asked the staff to have the same conversations with each other about what matters to them and were taking these results to their next team meeting to discuss how to act on what staff told them matters.
What did I learn?
I was able to talk to a couple of service users who told me what mattered to them. Ben told me what mattered to him was that he trusted his support worker Megan. He told me he didn’t trust her at first but he does now so nothing about Mainstay could be better for him just now. He also told me he liked computers and wanted to see his picture on Twitter.
#wmty18 Ben McBride and Meghan shared his WMTY conversation with us – and told me about how important it is to trust his support worker pic.twitter.com/OW9gK4eaqb
— ClaireGoodheirCurtis (@Clairog) June 6, 2018
What difference did it make?
I saw first-hand the person-centred approach that Mainstay Trust were taking with people using their service. It was a joy to see a whole activity programme being developed in front of me (even down to voting for the recipes to be used in their cookery course!) based on what people told them mattered about life skills and independence and I look forward to seeing how it all develops.
~ Claire Curtis, Associate Improvement Advisor, Healthcare Improvement Scotland