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As a professional within the practice, I've always been advocating and promoting service
users and carers involvement but myself being a carer, I feel now, that at least it's an
opportunity for me to be involved in the training so I can at least do the same job but in a
different kind of way. It's helpful I think it's a learning on both sides, the students
as well. They find out exactly what the carer's perspective is, and for me as well you know,
I get the support and I then feel that I'm not alone.
That's what I've found, because you can feel a little bit in the background when you're
a carer and coming here at first it was a little bit daunting, I thought “Can I do
this?” but because we had a lot of support from the staff here it gradually built and
built that we did a little bit more and got more into it and that and then it was lovely
to see that we were getting feedback as well from the students to say that they enjoyed
our input and then it gave them a real experience before they went out on placement and things
like that. My involvement started with doing case histories
and really I wanted to stress to the students the importance of social workers because I
wanted to highlight the good points of a social worker as well as the things that weren't
quite as good and the value of social workers to families and I felt that that was really
important and I valued the friendships here and the way people treated us and also as
you said you get more and more involved like being involved with the scenarios and role-plays,
which I thought I would hate and which actually I quite like it now.
I felt as well when I left work I thought that I'm no good to anybody I'm just a carer
and because of my commitments I can't work anymore but now I can see the other side you
see and I can feel I'm still quite productive in my own kind of profession but in a different
way and of course my passion for working with people is always there, so that gets me involved
with people and talking to everybody, you know. It just keeps me going as well.
We've done quite a few varied things, I mean, the other week we did alcohol awareness and
we had a lecturer came and talk to us about that with the students and we all took part
together in that and it was was loads of informative information that obviously sort of was good
for us but also the students as well dealing with people who probably have you know, problems
with alcohol, it was good to have a mix and hear their discussions after the lecture as
well.