David, knowing nothing about Service User Involvement I would like it if you could expand on the questions as quoted below as they don't mean a lot to me as they stand and I would like to understand more!
How do we know it's making a difference?
How can we persuade people to pay for it?
How can we remind people it takes time to do it properly?
How could you tell if a service was good at it?
Thanks
People usually get involved to change something, if everyone thought the services they got were perfect then you could make a reasonable case for saying service user involvement was unnecessary. So the first question is really "how do we know service user involvement leads to a positive change?" or "improvement?"
Secondly, service user involvement has a cost even if individual service users aren't payed for their involvement. The more thorough your involvement, the more it costs. Suppose you want to design a new service and you want "service user involvement". You could invite a service user to sit on a planning group, you could send out a survey to existing service users, you could have a series of "stakeholder meetings", you could have an internet poll, you could contract a group of service user researcher to work along side you...
All of those options cost more than doing no service user involvement
Thirdly, service user involvement is often rendered meaningless by short timescales. For example "please send us your views on this six hundred page document by next Tuesday"
Fourthly, some services are acknowledged to be better at service user involvement than others, what characteristics help shift the good from the bad?
Does this make a little more sense?
D