Visibility and Invisibility in Service User and Carer Involvement

As demonstrated in the preceding chapters, service user and carer involvement has moved on significantly in the past 20 years, developments which have been influenced by the campaigns of new social movements which sought to challenge paternalistic and disempowering services alongside sociopolitical developments focused on consumer citizenship. As a result many social policies, particularly in the fields of health and social care, now include requirements to involve those who use services in the development and delivery of them. This is further evidenced in requirements relating to the training and education of professionals (Health and Care Professions Council, 2013). As highlighted in Chapter 2 the notion of involvement has been conceptualised in a variety of ways, from people simply being involved in or allied to a service through to more aspirational policies aimed at parity of participation and co-production (Sheldon and Harding, 2010). Policy is clearly now more focused on developing involvement which is meaningful and not simply tokenistic and, as demonstrated previously, many of those engaged in these processes would argue that they are at least working towards co-production. In addition we have seen how changes in terminology also reflect this move towards equality, control and co-production, something which is demonstrated further in Chapter 8. However, as Iliffe et al. (2013) note, amongst the range of people who are stakeholders in service user involvement, there will be adversaries and agnostics as well as advocates.