Lived experience partner, East London NHS Foundation Trust, England

Lenna started her Quality Improvement (QI) journey as a service user at East London Foundation NHS Trust (ELFT) in Luton, an area north of London, England.

Lenna always had a desire and need to improve services for others and at ELFT she took up the opportunity to become actively involved in improving the service she received. Lenna completed ELFT’s ‘Introduction to QI for service users/carers’ training course which ignited an interest in improvement. Lenna then joined the Trusts ‘Pocket QI’ training which gave her the QI skills to help her to be able to coproduce improvement with staff. During the pandemic when everything was changed to the virtual space, Lenna co-produced the ‘Introduction to QI service user/carer training’ so that the training could continue to be delivered virtually.

In order to gain a deeper insight to QI and to be able to lead QI projects Lenna recently completed ELFT’s ‘Improvement Leaders Programme’. Her next step is to become a QI coach so that she can coach teams in their improvement journey
 
Lenna highlights that… “Personally I find Quality Improvement empowering, through this empowerment I decided to use QI in my mental health recovery journey.  Since using QI in my recovery this has enabled doctors to diagnose a hard to diagnose mental health condition and for me to become an equal partner in planning my care. My mental health is now the best it has ever been and for the first time I am well enough to have a full-time job as a Peer Support Worker, empowering my peers to use QI in their own recovery”.