Having discussed priorities in your first meeting, you are in a position to develop an initial workplan for your Maternity Voices Partnership (MVP). It’s likely that this will focus on putting some processes and systems in place to get your MVP established, as well as identifying some small projects or “quick wins” that you can get started on to get your membership working well together. It will take time to get your MVP up to full strength, so it may help to start small and be realistic about what you can do with the resources and knowledge you currently have.
Some of the processes/systems you might want to work on at this stage include:
- Arranging your MVP meetings for the coming year
- Filling any gaps in your membership
- Identifying data sources that your MVP will use regularly and arranging for these to be shared as appropriate with your service user leadership team (e.g. Chair and Vice-chair) and your MVP membership.
- Setting up some form of regular feedback collection
- Identifying and prioritising those meetings or forums where service user input would be valuable.
Some ideas for small projects to get you started could include:
- Organising a focus group on a particular issue that your service user reps are concerned about
- Arranging an outreach session with a particular community group you’d like to hear from or perhaps a location that you haven’t yet recruited any service users from
- Coproducing a leaflet for your MVP or another resource that your staff members would like to coproduce.