Secrecy, transparency, purdah and the illusion of candour #ADASSspring #JusticeforLB

Earlier this week Sara posted a blog post titled State agents and lives on hold. In it she updates on the tiresome slog to get accountability and answers around her son’s preventable death, in an ATU. LB drowned in the bath, something an independent report found to be entirely preventable, fourteen months ago. Still no accountability […]

Shaking up the system inertia

First blog here in an age, so happy new year everyone! This week has seen the publication of two reports into the appalling standards of care for learning disabled people in the UK. The National Audit Office published their investigation into the utter failure to transform care, as promised following the abuse at Winterbourne View […]

Whose edge counts? #theEdgeNHS

Quick post from me. Today there is another NHS support programme being launched, the latest is #theEdgeNHS ‘The Edge is brought to you by the Horizons Group of NHS Improving Quality. The Horizons Group is a small team operating at the edge of current thinking and practice of change and transformation in health and care. Its […]

Courageous challenge versus conformist control

This morning I was up early (for a Saturday), scrolling through twitter, wondering how to kick start my weekend. Last weekend wasn’t my best one and I was hopeful for something to set a different path. Jodi Brown and friends didn’t disappoint: Genuinely killer question. I don’t know Jodi at all well, we’ve exchanged tweets […]

Love, light and hope #JusticeforLB

I’ve lost my blogging mojo at the mo, but I couldn’t let the sun set on this week without recording what an amazing week it has been. It started off with a trip to the big smoke on Monday to have an initial meeting about the #LBBill, a proposed private members bill instigated by the […]

My 60 thousandth tweet

I appear to be developing a bit of a habit of marking the round numbers of thousands of tweets with a blog post, not sure why really other than it seems good to mark the symmetry in some way, and perhaps also to take an opportunity to highlight a few things. My 35kth tweet was marked by […]

Tribes, camps and collectivism #JSWEC #JusticeforLB

Short post from me today because it’s Day 2 of #JSWEC, the morning after Social Care Curry and I’ve a workshop to run later today and I’m selling VivaCards, so lots and lots of reasons why this can’t be a long or detailed post. I offer that context to also point out that this is […]

A fascination of false dichotomies in social care

Short post from me highlighting something that I think is growing more popular in our conversations online, and is to be blunt wildly unhelpful: the rise of a fascination of false dichotomies (I made up the collective noun). What is a dichotomy I hear (some of) you ask? A dichotomy is a contrast or split, so […]

A month to go #hairhack

If you missed it at the weekend an amazing thing happened and Amanda Palmer, musician, connector, gracious lovely person shared my blog post on facebook with her fans, adding a commentary and exploring the point I made in the last post about people choosing to focus on her eyebrows, rather than her talk. I added […]

Asking for help

I watched a TED talk by Amanda Palmer last week, it was doing the rounds on facebook in one of those articles that is guaranteed to put me off! Enough people I respect commented or shared it for my interest to be peaked and I’m really glad I watched it. I would highly recommend the […]