What is the world coming to?

Yesterday I watched TV news reports with mounting unease as several hundred demonstrators invaded the West Yorkshire town of Bradford. It’s a town I know well from regular training visits around the area. Bradford is a community that, although it has had its problems, I have always found to be welcoming but otherwise unremarkable. Bradford [...]

Duty of care: a slug in a bottle

If there’s one thing that unites almost everyone concerned with health and social care services it’s the fear of being sued. Otherwise rational and courageous workers have been reduced to quivering wrecks at the mere suggestion of litigation or the slightest suggestion that they might have failed in or ‘neglected’ their duty of care. Duty [...]

GPS tags for mentally ill patients: what’s your opinion?

It is this notion of balance that perplexes me today. I am only too well aware of the civil rights argument but I’m also aware (painfully aware) that often the price for our ‘delicate, politically correct sensibilities’ is paid, not by activists such as myself but by the poor, lost and bewildered Alzheimer’s sufferer whose civil liberties we are trying to protect. Principle is one thing – a balanced reality is quite another. Least Restrictive Intervention is a fundamental principle of the Mental Health Act 2007. I can certainly see the argument that an electronic tag is less restrictive than incarceration in a locked hospital ward.

Died at home

Last January Derek & Jean Randall died. The couple, both of whom were in their seventies, died in their home in Northamptonshire, one from pneumonia and the other from heart failure. Both conditions seem to have been exacerbated by the effects of extreme cold. According to this week’s Community Care Magazine (communitycare.co.uk) Northamptonshire’s Safeguarding Adults [...]

Drugs, benefits & rehabilitation

There is a drug problem in UK. That seems to be a given. I’ll go so far as to say that I’ve never met anyone who would say otherwise, including drug users themselves (and I know more than a few of those). The drug culture is a very real blight on our society that is [...]

Making child abuse easier?

I don’t generally comment on child-related issues because it’s not my area of expertise but today I’ll make an exception. After all I don’t think I need to be an expert to understand the issue here. ‘Contact Point’ began in 2009. It provided a database that child health & social care professionals could access to [...]

Quality research?

There’s a story being published and republished at present in magazines and specialist journals about Chinese ‘research’ that allegedly found that Internet use causes depression among teenagers. http://www.the33tv.com/news/kdaf-depression-internet-pediatrics-journal-cyber-addiction-usage-story,0,5275090.story The evidence for this…. They looked at about 1,000 teenagers and some of them were depressed. Oddly enough the depressed teens also used the Internet a lot. [...]

The baby and the bathwater

I was talking on the telephone with a nursing colleague this morning, a very skilled and knowledgeable retired mental health nurse, about recovery from schizophrenia – one of my favourite topics. She has done a tremendous amount of work over the years on psychosis and the role of attachment in relation to the development of [...]

The unpopular patient

A friend of mine, and someone I greatly respect both as a nurse and as an individual is Felicity Stockwell. Many years ago Felicity authored what has become a seminal text for nurses interested in the dynamics of nurse-patient relationships and the therapeutic use of engagement.

The myth of the team decision

I recently posted a piece about decision making in health & social care work & the notion that the person who makes a decision should be the person who understands that decision. http://stuartsorensen.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/professional-courage-–-not-an-optional-extra/ I’d like to offer a little clarification about just what I mean by decision-maker. There is a long-standing (and very positive) tradition [...]