Staff Blog
Read the latest thoughts from our staff in our Staff Blog
Wednesday, 28 March 2018 15:26
Sam meets the first minister - Shared Lives launches 100 Lives
Written by Michael Kazich
Babs Lewis, Wales Development Manager, recaps on a great day launching the State of Shared Lives in Wales Last week. On Thursday March 22nd, Shared Lives carers from all over Wales and the people they support met up with Huw Irranca-Davies, Minister for Social Care, to launch our latest State of The Nation Wales Report. The Minister gave us a warm welcome, even sacrificing his lunch hour to see us when his meetings over-ran. He’s a real supporter of Shared Lives and we look forward to working with him again this year. And before returning home Samantha Hall and her…
In this blog, Ali Hall, Development Officer for Young People in Transition, responds to the second part of the Care Quality Commission's (CQC) review of children and young people. She thinks the findings are sobering but welcome, and call for the sort of approach that Shared Lives is well-placed to provide. Last week the Care Quality Commission (CQC) published ‘Are we listening?’, the phase two report of their review of children and young people’s mental health services. CQC were asked to conduct this review by the prime minister in January 2017. The phase one report summarises what is currently known…
Domestic abuse is prevalent; one in four women and one in six men will be victims of domestic abuse in their life time. Finding the right place to live can be a huge challenge for victims and survivors: finding housing, keeping it, ensuring it’s safe and appropriate. I’m Natalie and I currently work for a national domestic abuse charity called SafeLives. I have worked in the domestic abuse sector for over ten years and I’ve just been seconded to Shared Lives Plus to work on a new domestic abuse project. Funded by the ‘tampon tax’, we’re going to be working…
Friday, 15 December 2017 12:23
A man's home is his castle? - developing Shared Lives down under
Written by Phoebe Rowell
In this blog, Executive Director, Anna McEwen, shares her experience about taking Shared Lives to Australia In October, I was lucky enough to travel to Adelaide in South Australia to work with The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI) and the Wyatt Trust (a grant funder organisation). I have been talking with Carolyn Curtis, CEO of TACSI, for around three years while they have watched how Shared Lives has grown in the UK. As an innovation charity, they have been considering how they could bring the model to Australia where currently people are mainly supported in traditional and more institutional…
Thursday, 09 November 2017 17:48
Signs of Scotland’s changing social care - the canary and the coalmine collapse
Written by Ben Hall
National leaders need to listen as 17,000 people in care home doubt High quality care homes stop offering residential care for older people Scotland needs new ways to support and care for people 17,000 people who live in, or receive care from Britain’s second largest care home operator, Four Seasons, are today left in doubt about where they live, as the private equity firm Terra Firma pleads with lenders to approve a financial rescue package for it. Four Seasons was saddled with huge debts to its own owners after they bought the care provider in 2012. This £220m debt, loaned…
Wednesday, 23 November 2016 15:18
I wanted to give a whistle stop tour of my first month at Shared Lives Plus…
Written by Hannah Cain
I wanted to give a whistle stop tour of my first month at Shared Lives Plus… Our new Shared Lives Consultancy and Development Manager, Emma Clarke wanted to write a staff blog after her first month with Shared Lives Plus. My induction so far has been full of variety, from time spent in Liverpool being introduced to office based colleagues and my very swanky laptop, to attending the Parliamentary event during Shared Lives week, where I was given the joyous task of MP-spotting as keeper of the attendance list – not an easy activity given…
Friday, 19 August 2016 15:08
Shared Lives Plus is on a mission to show people that you can #dowhatyoucant
Written by Hannah Cain
Hello, we hope you’re all enjoying your Friday. Our Friday motivation this week is to continue to spread the word of our organisation and show everyone how we help transform the quality of people’s lives. Today, whilst scrolling through Twitter I saw #dowhatyoucant (celebrating people who defy barriers in life) trending and I began to think, what does that mean from a Shared Lives Plus perspective? So, I had a think whilst eating lunch and for us, we believe that all the people who use Shared Lives services and those who are not aware of us can #dowhatyoucant. Our interpretation…
Tuesday, 19 July 2016 14:59
New starter Tom blogs about his first Shared Lives carer meeting!
Written by Tom Giblin
My First Shared Lives Event My first Shared Lives event last week took me to Chelmsford in Essex for the first time in my life. The day began with each person introducing themselves briefly. Sporting a name badge with the job title “Marketing Manager”, I thought it was best to come clean to everybody before we started that I hadn’t actually been promoted and that I was only in my second week. Once introductions were over, Lyn explained how Shared Lives Plus membership works. It was interesting to gain an overview of how the membership can benefit Shared Lives carers…
A while ago a wrote three blogs about three ways to avoid real change. Here’s a fourth: talk about the change we need as being ‘a culture change’. Most the most profound and important changes we need to see in public services, we describe as ‘culture changes’. Things like the need for the NHS to be patient-centred (who was it centred on before?); the end to covering up mistakes and blaming other people (‘blame culture’); a shift towards focusing on what people can do and their individuality, not what they can’t do and the label we’ve given them. What do…
My colleague Sian Lockwood OBE is Chief Executive of our sister organisation, Community Catalysts CIC, which has developed a highly effective model for helping local areas to find, grow and sustain community enterprises, some of them micro-scale, as a way of creating completely new care and support choices for local people. The model involves recruiting and training a local enterprise Catalyst who is embedded in the area to find, nurture and network local social entrepreneurs, helping them to set up enterprises and to navigate any bureaucracies they run into along the way. This can often be the missing link between personal budgets and real…
More...
This is a guest blog by our Director of Support and Development, Anna McEwen (@annasharedlives) who writes: The other day I was walking down my street on the way to the station to go to work. As I passed my neighbours a few houses down from my house an old man leaning on his zimmer frame was calling for help from his front door. As I went over, he told me that his wife had had a fall and he needed help. So, I went in and found his wife on the floor in the front room (their bedroom) where…
Here is Matt’s Shared Lives story: more stories on our website. “My name is Matthew Sheppard and I have lived in Shared Lives for five years. I live with Chris and Denis my carers and two other guys.
The National Audit Office (has published a fairly scathing report on what it sees as the lack of evidence being gathered on the impact of implementing personal budgets. It recognises that personal budgets have wide support and that most people (but not all) benefit from the policy, and it notes the number of anecdotes of positive experience, but it does not accept that the national surveys of outcomes associated with personal budget use are robust enough as a national evidence base, because they rely on councils choosing to take part.
This is a guest blog written by three of our seven new Ambassadors, Dipan, Phoebe and Paul, who were working with Lyn Griffiths, our Support and Engagement Manager. The Ambassadors are our first team members who use Shared Lives themselves. Their roles include peer review, raising awareness and improving the Shared Lives model. They write: