Another week another conference, but it was social-work-run this time so no multi-coloured pens. It was a South-East London Skills for Care conference for practice educators and students. Yes, I wrote that right. They’re called educators in official speak now, after a period of being assessors. This is good because it reflects the full range of what they do, and not only the surveillance and checking role. As someone who chaired a lot of examination boards in his life, I know the assessment role is important, but it’s only a part of education, and it should never be presented as the whole. So whoever has moved to this new terminology – good on them.

Seeing a boss’s biography at a conference organised by Counsel and Care for… (it used to be for elderly people, but now it’s got an inclusive logo (in four colours, pretty but expensive to keep reprinting if you run short of money) and a longer strap line of people that it’s for, but to you and me it’s still older people. But I see that Stephan Burke, who I’ve not come across before, its chief executive, is proud of his 25-year career in ‘public relations, journalism and fundraising’. Just the guy with expertise to run an organisation concerned about older people. But he’s probably been good for the logo.

No disrespect to Stephen, who also has political and management roots, but it’s a sad commentary on services for all sorts of people excluded from our society in poverty, as many older people are, that the best person an organisation can find to lead them is a public relations consultant. Of course, it might just mean that people who really have the expertise to help older people are getting on with doing the job, but I suspect its another commentary on our media-obsessed age that any organisation thinks it needs a public relations man rather than someone who can do the job. And I suspect also that it will in the end lead to disillusion with voluntary and social care organisations in the same way that Blair and Cameron discredit politics, people will see it as all smoothies feathering the duvet for their next job, instead of really being committed to people and their needs. I exclude Gordon Brown from that comment. For obvious reasons.

Still it won’t put me off Counsel and Care’s very good public information leaflets: http://www.counselandcare.org.uk/ Their care homes guide is specially good: http://www.counselandcare.org.uk/helping-you/careguides/

Because I’ve been away on holiday and this blog is not published outside the Hospice yet, I have not been posting daily, but now I’m posting the backlog.

Pics of the St Christopher’s building works, in solidarity with colleagues who are working in difficult conditions, so that things can be better in the future.

The way through the woods (another pacth to the gardens cut off):

To a conference on transforming social care, with a speech by Ivan Lewis, the Minister for Care Services (known to some as Ivan Otherinitiativehere, and you could tell why from the speech, the middle of which was a bit list-like; he needs a less drone-like speechwriter, but he performed it almost as a human being considering what he was coping with).

The overall conference message was that if you look at the plans for social care, you can see the future of the NHS here. In particular, Lord Darzi’s plan for ‘personal health budgets’ connected with something I haven’t seen referred to in quite this way before, that is ‘notional independent budgets’ for social care service users. Apparently, they have recognised that not everybody wants to organise their own care, so they get a notional sum of money allocated to them, which the care manager then allocates to services. Then, if it’s not enough, you know what you’ve got from the state, so you can add to it yourself if you like (having of course in the case of social care, had the amount you had to pay according to the means test taken away first). This fits with the idea that people would be told in advance what the minimum they would get from the state would be for their care, and then they could add to it if they wanted something better or nicer. That’s public choice for you.

A very lively contribution from Imelda (I want to say Marcos or Staunton but actually) Redmond, the very bouncy but sensible Chief Executive of Carers UK (just the sort of person you would want caring for you, I thought). She was asked how effective incentivising GPs to set up a carers’ register of people caring for their patients and didn’t know. Apparently GPs can get points towards their salary for keeping a register of carers they are responsible for. One member of the audience said it hadn’t worked so well in his area, because some GPs who had done it said that the information was patient-confidential, so they couldn’t tell anyone else who was on it. So much for the hope that our brave primary care physicians would cooperate with other professionals and agencies in identifying people who were at risk or needed extra services.

And I got another addition to my register of ludicrous Department of Health job titles: Jeff Jerome has (just) become Director of Social Care Modernisation, but then I can talk, having once been a Director of Psycho-social and Spiritual Care. I was called to see one mentally ill person in reception once, and she looked at my badge and said: ‘psycho-social and spiritual care – I need some of that.’ At least she could read it, but my problem always was that I was never very sure what it was, except a convenient administrative division.

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 day centre in the sky

I see the new guy whose job is to try to make people aware of NHS management research from the Service Delivery and Organisation (SDO) Programme of the NHS is called a Director of Knowledge Mobilisation. I am putting this up for the prize for silly NHS-speak job titles, but actually they have a good newsletter and website with lots of research information and reports about how to organise healthcare services better: http://www.sdo.lshtm.ac.uk.

At the annual GSCC conference today. As one of the final speakers implied by identifying herself as a registered social worker thus distinguishing herself from all the other speakers, one increasingly wonders whether anyone associated with telling social workers what their job is and how it should be done has ever actually done the job themselves. They have a newish director who is a former civil servant (are we to regard the social care professional registration body as just another civil service job?) and a director of strategy who realised the problem. He concealed what he was a director of in the two councils he worked for, presumably not of anything to do with social work, because of how he described his job in a glorious example of what John Harris calls businessology, that is turning everything that isn’t business into business. This is it: ‘[Mick Lowe] is responsible for helping to set the organisation’s strategic direction through policy development, business planning, legal services, communications and business development’.

The wonders of social work were revealed by a television producer advertising herself by showing excerpts from tomorrow night’s television programme about a deprived child and his trying-hard-to-cope mother, avoiding showing what the social workers actually did, presumably because it was confidential. Any social worker could show you a dozen such people, and this presentation as part of the major conference of the professional registration body discredits the GSCC. Here it is, speaking to the people it registers and whose professional value it is supposed to uphold and it gets a television producer who has nothing to say to advertise her wares to people who are actually doing the job.

Another thing about this conference is that it is free if you apply early enough (and inaccessible if you don’t); as one of the attenders said to me: ‘how much of our registration fee is going on this?’ Another attender said to me that this was the only training event that she was going to this year, as her local authority allocated no money to staff development, and here is the GSCC promoting staff development as a basic requirement for professional practice, with this and that programme and set of requirements. So what is it doing about the benighted attitude of many local authority employers to training and professional development? And the lack of money that the government is putting into social care professional development? If you work in the NHS, continued education is taken for granted and funded: why is social care different? I met another group who missed the minister’s speech because their local authority let them come, but wouldn’t agree to fund peak rail fares. Well I suppose that’s business for you.

Harris, J. (2003) ‘Businessology’ and Social Work, Social Work and Society 1(3): http://www.socwork.net/2003/1/debate/400/index_html/?searchterm=Harris

I’m being the Hospice’s Caldicott guardian today at a meeting with a local hospital. The email comes from the ‘PA to KGC and Risk’. I had to look to see what this is: ‘Knowledge, Governance and Communications’; fancy having a job title like that with Risk added to it. You could turn this round and become the director of Grack. We’re hoping to come to an agreement to share information between the hospice and one of our local hospitals.

You don’t know what a Caldicott guardian is? This is serious stuff. Basically, I’m supposed to speak up for confidentiality and privacy of the Hospice’s patients and clients in the Hospice’s management forums. Health and social care agencies are all supposed to have one, including social services departments. When I was given this extra job role and registered with the guy who keeps the national list, I was welcomed to the Caldicott community (but only by email, so it wasn’t a socially exciting welcome, not even a peck on the cheek). It seems that’s about the extent of the community.

However, if you want one, too, you can go to the Department of Health Caldicott website: http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Managingyourorganisation/Informationpolicy/Patientconfidentialityandcaldicottguardians/DH_4100563. this contains a manual of good practice, largely a list of other websites, and quite a nice paper of examples of good practice.