PPlog

NSUN Bulletin: 18.6.10 FREE Seminar: Social Care Mental Health Research Seminar 06 July 2010 9.30am – 1.30pm at Birmingham and Midland Institute, 9 Margaret Street, Birmingham B3 3BS The Heart of England Hub is part of the NIHR Mental Health Research Network whose overall objective is to “provide the infrastructure to support large scale, high quality research in mental health and social care”. I would like to invite you to a seminar on developing Social Care research within the region. We are particularly hoping to encourage more ‘home-grown’ research projects. The seminar aims to bring together interested academics, practitioners, managers, service users and carers in order to identify emerging areas of interest – with a view to setting up working groups to take these ideas forward and turn them into potential bids for research funding. To start the ball rolling, we will have brief presentations on two topics of current interest: · Personalisation – this is a prio...

NSUN Governance and Administration A discussion document for the NSUN board 1. After our last meeting, without quite knowing why, I felt some discomfort about the direction our discussions had taken and some of the content of our discussions. As most of our focus was on our new charity status and NSUN’s future needs I decided to give this more thought and to do some individual research. 2. It was easy to pin down the broad underlying reasons for my discomfort: 2.1 The first is to do with personal ideology. For me, financial considerations have, apart from the necessity of daily existence, come bottom of my list of priorities with cultural, inter-social, artistic and consideration of others having far more value than money. So I find I have little patience with business and finance matters - and a great deal of distrust. 2,2 Separately but in parallel, as a long standing campaigner for user involvement and a sometime advocate alongside other users I have a healthy dislike a...

Friday 28th we had the last workshop of our Joint Strategy user group. Part of this workshop was scheduled to establish the group’s terms of reference for our personalisation monitoring functions. The facilitator was Peter DeOude, Membership and Inclusion Manager at the Coalition. Bouyed by Laurie’s letter and the statements in it (see last post) I’d printed it out and showed it to a couple of the group members early on. They seemed somewhat cool at my enthusiasm, commenting it didn’t change anything WE were doing. I tried, when Peter asked for any introductory questions, to bring Laurie’s letter to the attention of the group but before I could get very far I was stopped by Peter. I sensed this was when I made mention of ‘mental health.’ I sensed, too, that I was being singled out for gagging - as other group members were allowed to speak at length about their issues. A little later I tried to bring the letter to Peter’s attention...

On 27th May I received mail with an attached letter from Laurie A’Court of Norfolk County Council. This letter is copied below with my italics.: I refer to your original complaint of 7 th April and the subsequent email correspondence with Mr Bowerbank, County Manager, Sensory Support Unit who responded initially. As you initiated correspondence by email I hope you are happy to receive a response by email rather than through the postal system. You have expressed your concern that the Joint Strategy for People with Physical and Sensory Impairment is discriminatory and you still have those concerns following the previous communications. I hope the following information helps to further explain our view. Firstly, you have asked for a copy of the Mental Health Strategy. I have asked for a copy of this to be emailed to you separately as soon as possible. On a point of clarification, in your email to Paul Bowerbank on 21 st May you refer to a Joint Strategy for monitori...