Can social media improve service quality? #NCF2014

Last week I had the absolute pleasure to attend #NCF2014, the annual conference of the National Care Forum. This year’s conference saw a room full of Chief Execs, Trustees and colleagues from care provider organisations debating the eternal question of how best to focus on Bringing Quality to Life. The conference opened with this film, made […]

JusticeforLB: A movement for change

Less than two weeks ago a report was published on Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust’s website, detailing an independent investigation into the death of 18 year old Connor Sparrowhawk in an NHS hospital. Connor was known as LB, short for Laughing Boy, online. The Connor Report, found that his death was preventable. The report appears very […]

Five things I wish I knew when my Dad was dying of cancer #cholangiocarcinoma

Last November my Dad died from bile duct cancer, cholangiocarcinoma. Bile duct cancer is an incredibly rare cancer with current estimates of 1,000 new case in the UK each year and 2,500 in the US and an annual incidence rate of 1-2 cases per 100,000 people in the Western World. Search twitter for people talking about […]

My 35 thousandth tweet

Unusually for me I didn’t check twitter the moment I woke up this morning, instead I visited the twitter website as soon as I turned my mac on. It was this that meant I spotted something quite surprising, to me at least – that last night I’d reached the (completely meaningless really) marker of 35k […]

Positive giving

I’m going to start this post with a disclaimer! I don’t know an awful lot about fundraising, or charitable giving so I’m not offering this post as some sort of expert advice. I am however interested in the potential of social media to share messages or build a narrative, and thought I’d share my personal […]

Life after Bobby: the first 100 days

It’s 101 days since Dad died today, I’d been thinking about this (non)-anniversary all week and was fully aware of it yesterday but couldn’t bring myself to concentrate long enough to write this post then. I’m confident Dad would appreciate the quirk of it being 101 days anyhow. So I’m going to keep this short […]

Social media and citizen engagement

Over the past week I’ve blogged an argument as to why people should be taking notice of social media and have also worked up a discussion of the analogy of social media as a vehicle, so today I thought it was time to consider what journey the social media vehicle could take us on, and […]

Reaching critical mass? Social media at #NCASC

Last month I attended my fourth National Children and Adult Services Conference #NCASC in Eastbourne. The first time I attended in 2009 was to launch the resources from Safety Matters, an action research Change Project I’d been running at RiPfA focusing on adult safeguarding. We had a session in Harrogate presented by myself and a […]