Consumers Consumer Representative Orientation Handbook

We are pleased to announce that a new North West HHS Consumer Representative Handbook has now been developed.

The contents of this booklet are intended to guide our consumers into their role in the North West HHS Region. While it is to help the consumer, it is also dependent on consumers themselves for an evaluation of its helpfulness.

It is continually open to review and the Partnering with Consumers Committee would greatly appreciate your comments, positive and negative, that can help to improve the booklet and the pathway into the health consumer role.

In the development of this handbook many health consumer representatives across the North West HHS region have collaborated.

What is a Consumer Representative?

They are people who currently use our health services (patients, consumers and their carers and families) and community members who may need to in the future.

Areas where our consumer representatives often help us include: developing patient information, such as brochures planning improvements and changes in how we provide services being part of our discussions on quality, safety and patient experience helping with staff and volunteer training and recruitment

Consumer representatives are important to us in keeping the perspective of the patient and their carer and family central to what we do and helping us to see things from a different perspective. We need to know what is important to our community in order to help make North West HHS a health service that meets your needs.

How to use this handbook?

This handbook will be made available to our existing consumers within committees, working groups or projects, to help support their consumer journey. We hope that this handbook is a helpful resource that contributes to a positive consumer partnership between our consumers and our health service.