In June 2018, which feels like a lifetime ago but is only actually 6.5 years, I met Elly Chapple for the first time. It was at Festable at National Star College, we’d been connected online for a while, but on that day I heard her talk about her daughter Ella, and the lessons she had […]
Last week I wrote a post reflecting on the first week of LB’s inquest last year. It focused on some of the themes that emerged in that first week, the sprinklings of candour, the constant undercurrent of mother blaming, the contradictions and flaky knowledge of epilepsy, even then, years after LB died, years after Southern […]
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 […]
Today is World Mental Health Day 2014. As ever I’m a little uncertain and sceptical about the actual impact of awareness raising days, but genuinely believe we’ve a long way to go before discussing mental health is truly easy and accepted in society, so thought I’d add my two pennies worth. Today I’m feeling prickly. […]
I’m on holiday at the moment, enjoying being sporadically connected, but today I found myself lost for words again. A couple of weeks ago I blogged a post about challenging anything NHS and the difficulties of doing so. In it I suggested 7Cs that I think I observe in communications around the NHS: control, construction, centralisation, challenge, […]
I’ve realised this evening as I was scrabbling around for something to numb the pain in my gum (don’t ask) that I’ve incredibly strong associations with Bonjela; and sadly the most recent one has tainted it somehow. http://instagram.com/p/sN3rnJATfJ/ As children my parents desperately tried to keep us healthy. There was no junk food in our […]
Once I’ve started something I always try my hardest to finish it, so having deconstructed and analysed paragraphs 1-9 of a letter from Katrina Percy to Sara Ryan, this post attempts to finish the rest of it. If you’d like to catch up before reading this, you can read the analysis of paras 1-3 here, then paras […]
I continue, huge respect to anyone with the stamina to keep coming back to this issue, but as the conversation on twitter suggests it needs unpacking. You can read the analysis of paras 1-3 here and paras 4-6 here. Sara’s original letter is here and Katrina Percy’s response here. If you’re sitting comfortably, cuppa, chocolate, […]
This post continues on from Impersonal correspondence: paras 1-3, all the context is there. This post continues to deconstruct the letter, starting at paragraph 4: ‘Like every single organisation and individual in the world, we are not perfect and on a rare number of occasions we get things wrong, sometimes with deeply distressing consequences. On […]
I’ve been involved with the JusticeforLB campaign now for over six months, a number of people who work in communications roles, especially in the NHS, have been in touch in that time to say how useful this campaign has been for their learning, indeed one person described Southern Health’s behaviour as the ugly, of the good, […]