Welcome to my professional blog

I’ve been blogging in a personal capacity for a number of years and having left full-time employment I thought I’d take the opportunity to start a professional blog on my new website. It’s likely to cover topics such as research impact, utilisation of knowledge, dissemination of research findings, social media and it’s role as an […]

Engagement with research #openssw

Am at #OpenSSW today, going to be talking about engagement, evidence informed practice and research. Will blog later but for now, here’s how to NOT engage ppl w research!

Getting social care evidence into practice

There have been a couple of discussions on twitter and blog posts I’ve read recently that I’ve wanted to reply to, the most clear one came from @Ermintrude2 who wrote an excellent post about her struggles to keep up with research while working in frontline practice. Ermintrude, works as a social worker in an integrated […]

The art of doing nothing

This weekend I intentionally made no plans, relishing the prospect of four whole days without a single commitment. The one exception to this is that I promised Mum and Dad that I would spend the night with them on Saturday. Dad started chemo on Wednesday and we’d been warned that this weekend would be a […]

Don’t give up the ship, fight her till she sinks #cancer

Ten days ago I wrote a blog post The beginning of the end? that reflected on my Dad’s journey/fight/life with cholangiocarcinoma (bile duct cancer) over the past four years. Well ten days on and things seem to have progressed even further. In March alone Dad has had three blood transfusions, which equates to about 8 […]

Foodie hotel recommendations please

A couple weeks ago I asked the twittersphere for recommendations of foodie hotels that are either good for staying in, or visiting for nosh. A number of people replied with recommendations, but unfortunately I’ve lost their twitter tags so apologies if you sent one of these and aren’t getting your deserved credit. Here are the […]

Germ paranoia

My Mum and Dad had what I now consider to be an inspired approach to illness when I was a youngster…they did everything they could to ensure that as children we caught everything catchable, as young as possible! I had measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, you name it we’d be wheeled around to the neighbour’s […]

The beginning of the end?

Tomorrow is my second blogging birthday, at the time I started to blog I really didn’t know whether I’d enjoy it or what I’d talk about. I knew that I’d have some stuff to share though (never really short of an opinion) and I also felt that cancer would feature in these posts….I’m not sure […]

It takes time

A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of being on holiday in Beitostølen in Norway. I’ll do a post holiday reflection blog another time, but suspect it’ll be broadly similar to last year’s – which you can read here if you’re interested. In this post I wanted to share some sage advice that I was […]

Here we go again

Earlier on this evening I blogged about my fitbit, my favourite latest toy. There’s been quite a lot of chat in my twitterstream this weekend about being healthy and exercising, not sure whether it’s the cold dry weather, just that time of year, the promise of Spring, the hopeful shedding of our winter layer of extra blubber […]