Seeing Eye Dogs Australia Information

At Seeing Eye Dogs Australia our mission is to improve the quality of the lives of people who are blind or vision impaired by the provision of a trained Seeing Eye Dog. This puts the individual Client at the centre of what we do, because it is only by working in partnership with our service users that we are able to understand whether we are meeting our aim of improving lives. We have also found that by giving our Clients the opportunity to really comment on what we do, we are able to improve our service and make it more meaningful to the people we help. In order to get the right information back, we carry out a series of things, such as surveys and individual interviews, but one of the best ways seems to be our Client Services Advisory Committee. This is a group of Clients who get together with our Operations Manager and who are free to comment on any aspect at all of what the organisation does, all issues that are of concern can be brought up here and clients who are not on the Committee are advised who the members are and that they can ask them to bring up any issue on their behalf. This can be done anonymously if they wish, because although at Seeing Eye Dogs we think we are doing a good job, the people who really decide if this is so are the Clients that make use of our service, and every Client who has any dealings with us, should be given the opportunity to comment whether it is positive or negative. Indeed, although it is nice to receive positive feedback, giving people the opportunity to be critical of us is more important because it is a way of helping us get better. Seeing Eye Dogs Australia isn't made up of the staff that work there, or the Board of Directors, it's much bigger than that. Seeing Eye Dogs is a family network that encompasses everyone that is involved in it, which includes all the Clients and Volunteers, often the families of both these groups, it involves people who contribute to enable us to carry on and other professionals who work with us. Everybody in the Seeing Eye Dog family is encouraged to have a voice to comment on the important work we do. The Client Services Advisory Committee is just one way we try and make sure that this voice is heard by the right people.