5.1 We said we did – helping to do the work

While it can be tempting to think of NHS staff as “the professionals” in a Maternity Voices Partnership (MVP) context, in fact service user members of the MVP may be equally well-qualified professionals in another context and will be bringing a wide range of valuable experience and skills to the partnership. Service users will often step forward to do more than the standard expectation of their roles.

One MVP chair described a group of service users stepping up in this way:

“Sometimes… helping them to DO the work.. producing the leaflets.. helps to show what we mean by “this isn’t working”… (We) have truly CO produced (this resource) and YES it was designed by service user reps, YES they put it together, but then the trust took it and had it developed professionally and it’s looking wonderful.  Sometimes we have to do more than support a conversation to be deemed value for money and develop those relationships.”