I’m having a campaigning week this week, in a minor sort of way, because we have started work at St Christopher’s on our new anniversary project which is going to be for patients, carers etc to come in to the Hospice more in a flexible way, instead of coming in for the day to the day centre, and being visited at home. It should reduce social isolation, but it should also allow us to see more of the less sick patients.

However, I think there ought to be better facilities for children. At the Princess Alice Hospice, in Esher, they have a glass fronted children’s room in the coffee lounge in the entrance hall, where parents can lounge and watch their children. They have loads of activities, of which card-making for ‘sorry you’re ill granny’ type cards (obviously in a Hospice, you can’t have ‘get well’ cards. Or if you do, it’s time to start talking to the parents about what they are telling their children). There are some games, a DVD (you can choose from a load of DVDs at the front desk) and a computer.

We’re having computers for information for the adults, but not for children to play; this means that the info computers will get used by the children and there’ll be hassle. Also at Esher, they have garden games, quoits, giant Jenga, giant connect 4 and so on. Currently all children aSt christopher’s can do is look at the fish in the pool. What do other hospices do, I wonder?

Pics of the rebuilding at St Christopher’s, now under way, in solidarity with all colleagues working through a difficult time, to make things better in the future:
The giant skip

Here we are dealing with reflective practice again. To Southampton for the launch of the book by myself and Gurid Aga Askeland (she from Norway, and yes she is – distantly – related to the family that produces aga stoves). The book argues that social workers (and people in palliative care come to that) need to understand how to cope with complexity. Our suggestions are critical reflection, cultural translation, knowledge validation (checking that the information you’re using is appropriate), developing strengths to deal with complexity, seeing yourself as piloting through chaos – that is, immense variability – look for the regularities, shift yourself progressively towards equality in what you do. It’s an Ashgate book, and cheaper from their website than from a bookshop: I reckon it’s got a reasonably clear explanation of what postmodernism, postcolonialism and globalisation is: worth the price for that alone.

Payne, M. and Askeland, G. A. (2008) Globalization and International Social Work: Postmodern Change and Challenge. Aldershot: Ashgate.
http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calctitle=1&pageSubject=471&title_id=9407&edition_id=10065&history=default.aspx%3fpage%3d1249%26calctitle%3d1%26pageSubject%3d471

I argue that every social worker, indeed every professional, needs to understand social trends like globalisation and postmodernism if they are going to write court reports and help other professions and people affected by such trends. I often think that palliative care is a particularly postcolonialist. It has this philosophy that everyone who isn’t providing a palliative care service according to Western values and medical resources, is behindhand, whereas they might be just dealing with death and bereavement differently.

To Sheffield for an editorial meeting at Lena Dominelli’s house, for (we call it) ‘The Trilogy’ of books that Robert Adams, she and I edit for Palgrave Macmillan and is next year to come out in a new edition. For the first time all the books are being reedited simultaneously, and we are redoing them so that they are internally consistent. This has meant recommissioning about forty chapters.

But this meeting is about the chapters we write jointly; Lena and I expatiate and Robert takes notes to turn them into first drafts. Among the topics is how we deal with reflective practice, which was virtually new as a topic when we did the first edition back in 1997, but is now part of everyone’s best practice, both in social work and in other related professions.

A recent nursing student I talked to was doing ‘reflective practices’ for her course assignments. So much so, I say, and will write in my chapter on it, that it has become part of established practice, without anyone being really clear how you’re supposed to reflect. Added confusion in social work comes from ‘reflexive thinking’, imported from research methods by particularly feminist enthusiasm for putting yourself in the place of the person you’re doing the research about.

It comes to my notice that the South London Association of Bereavement Services has a limit on accepting potential bereavement volunteers onto its very good course that we patronise; they require a diploma in counselling skills for entry. I don’t mind people coming into bereavement volunteering with an interest in moving towards being counsellors, lots of them do. But I cannot be alone in thinking that the sort of person who goes on counselling skills courses is a particular sort of person, and by limiting entry to them, we are excluding what I might describe as the relentlessly ordinary salt-of-the-earth type with just life experience from our bereavement support service. Frankly, I think our bereaved clients might well prefer the salt of the earth type over the keen counsellor type, but I know that’s heresy to the professionalisers of personal help. Of course it’s efficient not to have to run our own course with flexible entry requirements. And of course people get a lot out of learning with people from other organisations. So there you are

Pics of the rebuilding at St Christopher’s, now under way, in solidarity with all colleagues working through a difficult time, to make things better in the future:
Temporary huts, decanted staff

Touchbase, the Department of Work and Pensions newsletter arrives, and notifies me of a further personalisation initiative from the government; the first paragraph of the news item focuses on shifting funding from assessment and care management to ‘user-led’ services, presumably in the social services. Affecting all care services, though, is the proposal to get people to stay in work ‘when they become ill or an existing condition worsens’. Views to the Independent Living Review, Office for Disability Issues, The Adelphi, 1-11 John Adam Street, London WC2N 6HT.

You can get Touchbase and it keeps you in touch with pensions and financial assistance information: http://www.dwp.gov.uk/publications/dwp/touchbase.

The papers are full of the outcome of The Apprentice (BBC 1, last night). I wonder if there might be an apprentice programme for public, or health and social care services? Interviews show that Sugar is obviously a more sensitive and thoughtful man than the format of the programme allows for. I think it would be good for the young men and women (what do their parents think of their behaviour and attitudes? I’d be seriously embarrassed if any of my children were like that) to be brought up against some of the management tasks involved in running health and social care. It might introduce them to activities in society that are actually useful, rather than working on developing men’s fragrances. How about establishing a volunteer bereavement service in three days, instead?

We’ve all been hearing about the new Diploma that may (or on the other hand may very well not) take the place of A-levels (in view of the history of politicians not changing anything to do with the moribund bits of our education system – I mean A-levels). Now there’s a consultation from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) about one on the public services. (In passing I note that Rebecca Johnson, who sent me this circular, in spite of her doctorate and lectureship at Southampton University, doesn’t seem to know that ‘criteria’ is a plural noun; however…).

I look at what it says about health and social care (http://www.qca.org.uk/qca_17472.aspx). It doesn’t (social care is apparently beneath the radar), but it does cover something called emergency, health and social services), on account of how there’s a slice of it on health and wellbeing, although sixth-formers and FE college attenders are supposed to be able to get the general principles of public services without knowing about anything in detail. There’s a naïve assumption there that you can understand your local public services because they’re all organised on a rational and generalised basis, when in health and social care every area is different, and there aren’t any principles. Wellbeing is new government jargon for feeling good – it’s nicely vague even compared with welfare and somehow allocates the responsibility to you, instead of to services that might help you.

I’m pleased to see that the Diploma will be organised so that students can develop and apply skills through ‘holistic purposeful activities’ whatever that means. Further down, I find it means they can learn at a basic level to decide whether it’s worth it to society to provide health and wellbeing services to the public. Frankly I’d rather they learned that it is integral to the cohesion of any society to organise to help our neighbours with health and wellbeing, but this has passed the QCA by.

The people who receive public services are described as ‘customers’, another example of businessology (see 6th May), rather than citizens or patients or whatever: however: While there are clearly links between the Diploma in public services and the citizenship curriculum at key stage 4 there is a clear distinction. The citizenship curriculum examines the place of the individual in society, whereas the Diploma in public services builds on this understanding and explores how organisations and structures are required to identify and meet the needs of individuals and groups. It is understood that public servants need to be good citizens. Well, that’s good then, but it doesn’t make the people they’re serving customers; citizens are entitled to things because they pay taxes and play a part in society; customers just pay.

The health and wellbeing bit starts off: In the UK there is a standard of health and well-being that citizens have come to expect as a right (I interpolate: unless they’re poor or from an ethnic minority – we know that excluded citizens generally don’t see themselves as having a right to a high standard of services, because they often don’t get them), and this topic considers the public services for health and well-being that maintain or enhance this standard.

Apparently, students are being trained at an early age these days to use the American jargon, because the words ‘charity’ or ‘voluntary organisation’ are de trop in one topic: the ways in which the third sector helps to deliver local health and well-being services. I realize it’s about public services and that poor benighted people who work in charities aren’t providing public services, according to the people writing this document, we just help those who are really doing it.

And students are being brought up with the right neo-liberal public attitudes at A-level equivalent, because one of the assessment tasks is working out whether it’s financially worth it for society to provide health and wellbeing to the customers: carry out a basic cost–benefit analysis on a service for health and well-being it suggests Again, I think such services ought to be provided in principle, not because they satisfy some cost-benefit assessment. But I’m probably living in the past.

In general, I would describe this document as not pursuing an independent or professional analysis of the role of public servants, but aims to indoctrinate students in their teens with the present government’s managerialist agenda.

I see there’s another curriculum on society, health and development, but I’ve not been sent a consultation about that. I’ll see if I can find it for another day.

To Manchester to give a talk at a conference for the organisation Making Research Count. This is one of the organisations around in social care that is supposed to be encouraging practitioners to be interested in researching their work, and using research evidence to guide their practice. In this case, it’s a consortium of a local university and local agencies, which is reconfiguring itself to take in voluntary organisations, so far excluded. It’s a bit more of a bottom-up body than some of the groups (I’m thinking of RIPA and RIPFA and indeed SCIE – see my glossary of abbreviations in case you don’t know). One of the people there says that these bodies spend a lot of government money on parcelling up in easy chunks research results that the government thinks practitioners ought to be interest them and ‘marketing it’ (he actually used that word) to encourage them to use it. I think the government marketing research results is not a good way of getting people to use them.

On the morrow, I talk about the research governance and development of research among staff at St Christopher’s, and try to emphasise how a regular commitment to a bit of audit and strong involvement in higher degrees so that people at least do a dissertation once in their career is important. I also argue that collecting and interpreting ‘life-historical knowledge’ that people have and turning it into professional knowledge is just as much research as doing experiments and surveys. Also interpreting research results into knowledge that practitioners can really understand and use (not ‘marketing it’) is.

Making Research Count: http://www.uea.ac.uk/swk/MRC_web/public_html

Research in Practice: http://www.rip.org.uk

Research in Practice for Adults: http://www.ripfa.org.uk
Social Care Institute for Excellence: http://www.scie.org.uk

Pics of the rebuilding at St Christopher’s, now under way, in solidarity with all colleagues working through a difficult time, to make things better in the future:
Cone park

Here we go again with a government minister saying they’re going to get private sector managers to run failing hospitals. Under Ben Bradshaw’s blast is Chinook blunders at the MoD – half a billion down the drain; what makes people in central government think they’ve got any right to say anything about how the NHS and social care works? What could half a billion have done for older people? I say spend it on dementia not helicopters

Cameron made a speech about voluntary organisations; it’s not all that clear in the paper (Watt, N. Cameron wants to see charities paid market rate for public services Guardian: 11).that he is launching a new consultative document on Conservative policy on the voluntary sector. There are a lot of practical suggestions, but what he cannot admit is that only financial independence will give voluntary organisations any freedom of manoeuvre because local authorities, civil servants and ministers will never give up control over their fields of responsibility. He who pays the piper ignores the best tunes and just organises the bureaucratic funding mechanisms.

Conservative Party (2008) A Stronger Society: Voluntary Action in the 21st Century. Responsibility Agenda Green Paper 5, London: Conservative Party.

http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=news.story.page&obj_id=145106

Pics of the rebuilding at St Christopher’s, now under way, in solidarity with all colleagues working through a difficult time, to make things better in the future:
The caged day centre