Ms Liz Reynolds:

I thank Senator O'Loughlin for her kind words about St. Michael's House. I am delighted to hear she worked as a volunteer. That might help boost our volunteer programme, which we commenced recently, so I thank her for it.

In regard to consultation, we are moving towards services that are about participation. Our number one primary strategic goal is to have a rights-based approach. Our second focus is on participation. There are a number of strands to that. Some of it is about what lots of service providers, including Kare and St. Michael's House, do in terms of the local team and the person-centred plan of an individual, which is done on a local level. There are meetings with service users to voice their concerns, their level of happiness and their wishes. There are house meetings, and meetings locally in day units, etc. That is normal practice.

As I said, we want to move towards participation and that involves things like the PPI framework, which is one that is moving to participation in research on social and health services. For example, in research, it would not be research on service users, it would be research with or by service users. We are moving to that. We have done a lot of research on PPI, although I am not an expert on the subject matter. The next phase of that is to implement it in St. Michael's House and we are doing that.

As regards advocacy, that is in various strands, and it is in place throughout St. Michael's House. We have a strategic plan for St. Michael's House. We established a service users forum to ensure that the voice of the service user is heard at an executive level. We have learned lots from it since we started the process. We have met a number of groups, initially on Teams, and then in person. A lot of issues and themes were established from meeting with service users in those groups that feed into our work plan - our annual service plan - and also our strategic plan.

In terms of participation with families, we have developed training with the strengthened disability funding that is open to staff and family members. We have opened that out to family members. It is predominantly about right-based services. Families are part of the services in that they can come and talk to their local service.