Making rights make sense

‘Imagine leaving every night out at 9.30. That is the reality for many people with learning disabilities who require support to go out in the evening.’ So begins this Ted Talk by the brilliant Paul Richards, founder of Stay Up Late: I thought about Stay Up Late, and the initiative they established to help overcome…

A ‘doom loop’ is a negative belief cycle, where a series of beliefs, actions, and reactions work to reinforce negative beliefs and unwanted behaviours. I believe social care is caught in a doom loop, and the mission of those of us who want a better future needs to be to break free of it. The…

In Rethinking Dementia, Tom Kitwood makes a point that is both obvious and deeply challenging: noone, he says, has ever ‘come back from’ (late stage) dementia to tell us what it was like for them.  Hence, everything we think about what it means to live with late-stage dementia, and what can influence people’s experience of…

It’s no accident that Social Care Future’s vision begins ‘we all want to live in the place we call home…’. Invoking ‘home’ speaks to universal human experience and desire and as a result offers a powerful cognitive shortcut. Ask a group of people to dwell for 30 seconds on what comes to mind when they…

The collective wisdom among some influential voices in the social care sector is that the route to growing, retaining and securing better pay for the workforce is to ‘professionalise’ care work, to offer career pathways, to create a ‘register’ and to introduce a shared ‘brand-identity.’ The inspiration for this appears to be what has happened…

I’m seeing lots of broadcast, print and social media about social care today, including off the back of a petition delivered by Vicky McClure and Arlene Phillips on behalf of the Alzheimer’s Society to Number 10 calling for the government to ‘make dementia a priority’. The messaging follows a similar pattern, spanning ‘cure’ and ‘care’,…

In his New Year message, the Archbishop of Canterbury focused on the plight of our care system, announcing the forthcoming report of the Archbishop’s Commission on Care. From what I know of the Commission and the forthcoming report, it struck a discordant note for me. The message of not regarding people as a burden and…

If reports are accurate, I really welcome the call by the Archbishop’s Commission on care ‘for much greater emphasis on and resources for communities in providing social care.’  I was shocked, when researching a paper I wrote last year, to find that 50 percent of people living with dementia hadn’t drawn on any community-based support…

In 2016, my dad, then at the early stages of Alzheimer’s, saw an Ad in the Telegraph inviting people with the disease to join a drugs trial.  I forget the exact wording and I’m kicking myself for not having kept a copy, but the Ad itself did pretty much suggest it was about finding a…

Seems only fair I practice what I preach and put forward an alternative framing rather than only critique what is out there. Social care can’t wait A government and a society that values everyone will invest in everyone, helping us all to grow and maintain good lives for ourselves and the people we love. During…