Who: Llais, the independent voice for people who use health and social care services in Wales. This project was commissioned by the Llais team in the Swansea Neath Port Talbot area.
The brief: Llais wanted to gather feedback from people who have lived experience of social care services, and also aimed to broaden the methods they use for reaching communities that don’t always make it into formal consultations. The brief covered three things: mapping the landscape and identifying the right partner organisations, delivering the engagement itself across a range of settings, and writing up both what we found and what we learnt about how we found it.
What I did: Over four months from August to November 2025, I engaged with five partner organisations across Swansea and Neath Port Talbot, reaching older people, men in supported housing, people with learning disabilities and their families and support workers, and refugees and asylum seekers. The populations and settings were deliberately varied, and the methods had to match, ranging from informal one-to-one conversations over tea in a community shed, to a group session in supported housing (where trust was low and a light-touch approach was essential), to drop-in stands at public events, to sitting in on a relatives’ forum with a social care provider.
As well as gathering lived experience, the project turned out to be useful awareness-raising: many of the organisations I spoke with hadn’t fully known about Llais or its role before, and came away knowing they could use it as a resource and route for escalation. The summary report covered both the substance of what people shared and my reflections on what worked and what to do differently next time.
What we found: Across all five settings, people talked openly about the things that make social care harder than it needs to be: support withdrawn too soon, services that don’t talk to each other, having to chase everything yourself, and feeling like you only get help when something goes wrong. For people with learning disabilities in particular, the stories were stark, from hospital staff ignoring care documentation to GPs refusing to see patients. These findings are feeding into Llais’s ongoing work to build an evidence base and make representations to the people who commission and run services, with the aim of driving service improvements.
Photo by Nick Russill on Unsplash