Jack Straw’s been making a speech about human rights again. The main point is to say that any charter of British Human Rights should include responsibilities as well as rights. I have problems with the communitarian view of the world. Basic human rightsdon;t come with responsibilities. A right to education for the whole of yur life (even up to the moment of death), say, or to life itself, or to healthcare treatment or (I know this isn’t in any charter) to palliative care, or indeed to having a social work service (and a decent one) which also isn’t in any charter are all things that go along with being a human being in a civilised society. They should not depend on whether we have done our duty to society, particularly some duty imagined in its own interest by some political party..

The speech at: http://www.justice.gov.uk/news/sp280109a.htm

The Justice Ministry announced a ‘Charter for the Berevaed’ and there’s a consultation about what it will contain. But don’t h=get excited at all these new rights being announced: It isn’t about general rights for bereaved people (perhaps the Department of Health might think about it). It only focuses on bereaved people’s rghts in relation to coromers, although it provides at para 51 for bereaved family memebrs to get information about support services.

The Charter will (according to the press release):
– inform bereaved people about the role and powers of the coroner
– answer their questions about coronial procedures as promptly and effectively as possible
– take account, where possible, of individual, family, and community wishes, feelings and expectations, including their preferences, traditions and religious requirements relating to mourning and to funerals
– respect individual and family privacy
– explain, where relevant and on request, why the coroner intends to take no further action in a particular case.

You can see the consultation document at: http://www.justice.gov.uk/docs/charter-bereaved.pdf

I came across an interesting review of equality statistics. Although rather technical, it usefully gives you a picture of what statistics are available on various forms of inequality (race, age, gender etc). I ound the most interesting sections were about security, and it points up: how can you feel secure if you fear being discriminated against in important aspects of your personal identity. For example, if older people fear that health and social care services do not give them the same priority as younger people, they can be made generally insecure.

Walby, S., Armstrong, J., and Humphreys, L. (2008) Review of equality statistics London: Equality and Human Rights Commission. http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/publicationsandresources/Documents/Equalities/review_of_equality_statistics.pdf

Last week, to a meeting about strategy for social work research in healthcare; as we’re coming up to the next election, the social work ‘knowledge’ bodies are looking at how they can get more money for research. Several people speak about various projects, and I make a case for stronger support for audit and evaluation by practitioners as part of a coherent agency structure, and a national clearing house for useful data that results. I think wqe ought to create a body that sets topics that practitioners and agencies could research across the country, and then collating the data. Over a few years, we could massively improve the data available about social work and projects.

The whole advantage of audit as part of research is that it is really practice-informed. So much research is done by academics to their own or government agendas, and does not engage with anyone. That is why we have to have organisations like RIP (Research in Practice) http://www.rip.org.uk/ and RIPFA (Research in Practice for Adults) http://www.ripfa.org.uk that market research to practitioners.

Audit is widely used in healthcare, but less in social care, and has the capacity to engage people and produce useful data.

To Hull to the advisory group for the spirituality in funerals project, where the most interesting experience was the way the humanist officiant (the person who conducts a funeral) distinguished herself very strongly from sceualr funerals because humanists have beliefs and values. I’m not sure this is an accurate distinction; presumably secularists have values, but not such a consistent set as humanists. This interests me because I am trying to write at the moment about what social work would be like if it were clearly humanist. Some writers tend to say this, meaning humanitarian, while others think that humanist means like humanistic psychology, with a focus on the whole human being. Humanism as I understand it includes this, but I think some writers do not see humanism as being, as secular humanists would say, opposed to religion. Although there are Christian and Jewish humanists, too.

This interesting funerals project, which has been going for a few months now, has reached the stage of the researchers attending funerals. The process is that the funeral director inviyes the researcher to the meeting with the bereaved people, then attends the family’s meeting with minister of religion or secular officiant , attends the funeral and then interviews the family afterwards. The idea is to identify spiritual ideas that emerge in the planning and conduct of funerals. One foreign researcher surprise at the sombre clothing British people wear to funerals; not so in his country. I had taken this for granted; it’s always the unexpected things that stop you in your tracks about other cultures.

Website for the project: http://www.hull.ac.uk/socsci/research/projects/spirituality/index.html