ABSTRACT
Being termed a ‘service user’ is meaningless to anyone if it does not consider the person behind the label. Although I am proud of who I am, what I have achieved and enjoy being me, it is important that people see the ‘bigger picture’ of who I am. The label ‘service user’ applies to us all, and in many cases is only a very small part of everyday life. However, for some, it is a huge part of life, especially if services are not being provided as well as they could be. After becoming disabled later in life, I discovered what it meant to be a ‘service user’ in terms of health and social care. I could see gaps in service provision, and how some workers did not appear to see why they needed to involve service users at every possible level of the decision making process. Some workers often offered tokenistic gestures to involve people, but this was not real involvement, and made me more determined to challenge this. Involving service users in a tokenistic way achieves nothing other than ticking boxes and fabricating figures, which are then used to measure counterfeit involvement.
