Our Values
We want to realise our vision over the next 5 years in a way that demonstrates our values:
- User focused.
- Respect
- Equality
- Honesty
- Commitment
- Safety
We regularly involve the staff and users in discussions about our values, to make sure that everyone is committed to them and to make sure that we have a shared understanding of what these terms mean.
What these mean in practice:
User focused.
This means:
- Actively involving our service users in formulating policy, and in service delivery and design, and working with them to help them monitor the services to ensure that they are continuing to meet needs.
- Promoting the interests, rights, choices and wellbeing of people within Tower Hamlets with the experience of mental distress
- Addressing the range of needs that we identify with our service users.
- Being flexible and responsive to the changing needs of our service users.
- We will seek to create situations where service users can actively choose the services that they need, as opposed to having those decisions taken for them.
- Working in partnership with other agencies to ensure that service users have the widest range of services available to them
Respect
This means
- Showing service users, their families and carers, our staff, commissioners, referrers and other stakeholders and all our stakeholders that we value them and our relationship with them.
- Showing service users that their views are taken into account at all levels in the organisation, from the planning of services to responsible positions on the management committee.
- In working with people who are often stigmatised and socially excluded, we show that we believe in their potential and seek to influence others to empower that potential.
- We will advocate for the civil and human rights of our service users.
Equality
This means:
- Providing an effective local service, sensitive to the diverse cultures and individual needs.
- Ensuring our services are accessible to the diverse range of potential service users.
- Providing a service with diverse staff teams which reflect and are responsive to the differing needs of our service users.
- Challenging discrimination whenever it occurs.
Honesty
This means:
- Providing service users, staff, families and carers, referrers and commissioners and other stakeholders honest and accurate information about our services, within any agreed confidentiality boundaries.
- Fostering a learning, no-blame culture where mistakes are admitted and used as learning points.
Commitment
This means:
- Having ways of working and systems which guarantee and monitor the quality of our services from the perspective of service users, their families and carers, staff, referrers, commissioners and other stakeholders.
- Ensuring that our services are supported by high quality administration, so that front line staff are supported to deliver efficient and effective services and we can demonstrate this.
- Providing high quality, welcoming and accessible services in a variety of settings
- Ensuring that staff are supported to develop the knowledge, skills and confidence to deliver high quality services
- Always acting in ways which are professional and accountable, and ensuring that our service users are able to access other high quality professional services that they need.
Safety
This means:
- Ensuring that service users access their service in a safe and welcoming environment.
- For staff and service users to be supported to work in ways that they feel are safe.
- Ensuring that appropriate risk assessments are carried out, and that staff and volunteers are trained in how to perform these and use them.
- Ensuring that staff and service users have access to well-structured complaints procedure, and that a comprehensive whistle-blowing policy is in place.
- Ensuring that services have stable on-going funding.