Connect Voices Round Up 12 January 2022

Charlotte Jones, RNIB's National Involvement Coordinator shares the latest opportunities for blind and partially sighted people to get involved in.

Opportunities highlighted this week included:

Your chance to help RNIB to develop mental health training for staff 

At RNIB, our staff spend time and build relationships with blind and partially sighted people and are well placed to help identify whether they might be experiencing depression or anxiety. Recognising symptoms can be tricky, so RNIB (and other sight loss charities) are proposing to introduce a widely used questionnaire which can help staff to identify and start conversations with VI and blind people about mental health conditions. RNIB is developing an online training programme for our staff to help them feel confident and competent in having these discussions. We are working with representatives from other sight loss charities and staff at Cardiff University to develop this programme.

Share your  experiences of the Sight-Loss Pathway both good and bad 
The Vision and Eye Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin University are looking to set up in depth interviews or focus groups with blind and partially sighted people about their experiences of the sight-loss pathway. This could be good or bad experiences of eye hospitals, clinics, GPs, and rehab services. 

Help us to redevelop our RNIB website 

RNIB’s website is the main channel for information and access to services and advice used by blind and partially sighted people, families, members of the public and professionals. Therefore, it is important we understand the experiences people have when using our website. This will also be an opportunity to share your ideas about how we can do things better.  

We would like to invite you to participate in some user research and testing that will take place over the course of this year, 2022, so that we can understand a bit more about how you interact with RNIB. 

To find out more about these items and how you can get involved with RNIB Connect Voices do visit - https://www.rnib.org.uk/rnibconnect/connect-voices.

(Image shows RNIB logo. 'RNIB' written in black capital letters over a white background and underlined with a bold pink line, with the words 'See differently' underneath)