The Female Veterans’ Transformation Programme wants to work with you!
April 30, 2024
The Female Veterans’ Transformation Programme (FVTP) has launched a consultation & co-production phase and want to tell you what it is all about. FVTP is a three year, UK wide programme funded by the Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust and NHS England, in partnership with the COBSEO Female Veterans’ Cluster and the Women’s Royal Army Corps Association.
Over the last few years lots of work and research has been conducted on the challenges female veterans face as a result of their time in the Armed Forces. This work needs to now be used to take action and make improvements, so women get the right support at the right time and in a way that matters to them.
The new website –www.fvtp.org.uk – is a one stop shop for finding out about the programme and how you can get involved. Having pulled together the key themes of the research, they now want to hear from you to help co-design a toolkit to support service improvement across the sector.
These improvements must be made across ALL services, not just veteran specific organisations, to raise awareness and educate professionals such as GP’s, social services, hospital staff, leisure services, employers etc.
But this isn’t about focusing on what’s wrong, they also want to celebrate what is currently working well and where good practice exists.
This co-production will take place in 3 stages. Firstly, they are asking as many female veterans as possible, and services that support them, to complete the online questionnaire (fvtp.org.uk/get-involved).
Once returned, they will take the key themes to a series of focus groups. The focus groups will help create the main sections and criteria of the toolkit – setting out the self-assessment section which identifies ‘what you need to do to provide good services for female veterans’.
Reports from focus groups already conducted by other organisations will be captured and those running focus groups over the next few months will be asked to pose questions on their behalf.
If you have a recent focus group or If you are running focus groups or even having an informal gathering of female veterans for a coffee and you might be able to incorporate some questions, a facilitator’s pack is available (fvtp.org.uk/get-involved) which will guide you through different ways in which you could support.
The third phase will be the testing and adjusting the toolkit based on feedback from women veterans and those that support them, with the final version being available in the last stage of the project.
Your opinion matters so any information you can provide will go a long way to helping other female veterans in the future.