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well thought through. This will involve ensuring that relevant policies are up
to date and that the approach you are taking matches that outlined in CQC’s
‘Essential standards’. It could also be crucial to prepare your staff, and people
using your services, for any discussions they may have with the inspector, so
they know what to expect and can answer the questions as openly as
possible. Some providers have found an external audit very useful, both from
the information gained and also the experience of being inspected on
outcomes, with which they may not have been familiar.
My recommendations are that you get involved, be well prepared, don’t leave
it to others, and ensure that service users are right at the heart of what you do.
David Finney is an independent social care consultant with a specialist
interest in the regulation of substance misuse services and was formerly
national lead for substance misuse services with CSCI.
He will be running a one-day course in partnership with DDN, on Tuesday 18
June, to look at the changes in detail. CQC compliance - whatever next? is at
The Malmaison Hotel, Birmingham; email kayleigh@cjwellings.com or call
01233 636 188 for details.
ECTOR
May 2013 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| 17
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
Care Quality Commission |
Recovery
‘CQC... says that it will
inspect services according
to risks posed to people
who use the service...’
I WAS BACK ON TRAINS IN APRIL
, which gave
me the opportunity to hear froma lot of people
about their approach to ‘co-production’, a word
and concept, championed by public health,
that’s slowly entering into the mainstream. I
was in Norwich on the 17th, facilitating a UKRF
asset-mapping recovery seminar for (mostly)
service users and ‘peer supporters’. The next
day at the London User Forum (LUF) in Barking
I heard about some great user-led stuff going
on in London, and a week or so later I was in
Widnes at a recovery event doing a bit more
community asset mapping and hearing about
a different LUF, the Lancashire User Forum. A couple days after that I was in
Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire delivering another UKRF seminar, this time
focused on assets in the ‘Three Rivers’ area.
Tim Sampey, the CEO of ‘Build on Belief’ (BoB) a charity established in
2012 (having grown from SUDRG in Notting Hill, West London) to run peer-
led activities and services for people with substance issues, spoke at the
Barking LUF. In an eloquent, passionate and ‘off the cuff’ speech, this stood
out for me: ‘There’s something going on… a revolution… service users are
becoming a major part of the delivery of services… this is going to get bigger
and bigger…we need to connect with each other across London and learn and
grow together.’ I’ve been reflecting on Tim’s words, on what I’ve seen in the
last month, the willingness of many service users, practitioners and
community members to share their assets, get involved, ‘co-produce’, and
thought a little bit of recovery history might be interesting.
Larry Davidson in his book
The Roots of the Recovery Movement in
Psychiatry
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), traces the beginnings of ‘recovery’ as an
orientation back to the work of a chief physician, Phillipe Pinel, and Jean-
Baptiste Pussin, who worked together in Paris at the Bicêtre Asylum from
1793. Pussin, the superintendent of the asylum (working alongside his wife)
had himself been an ‘inmate’ at the Bicêtre in 1771.
So what did they do to dramatically improve ‘recovery’ within the
asylum? In a nutshell, they imposed a zero tolerance policy on abuse – nearly
all the staff were eventually sacked and replaced by ‘former and recovered
inmates’. They supported a community-learning environment and, most
significantly, they gave meaningful work to the ‘inmates’.
‘We will find, perhaps surprisingly, that recognition of the value of hiring
people in recovery to provide care to others – what is currently called “peer
support” – can be traced back to this era, when Jean-Baptiste Pussin… was
not only the first to remove the inmates’ chains but also the first to use the
strategy of hiring convalescing patients to provide
traitement moral
to the
patients of the asylum.’
I’ll leave you with a couple of questions. If, as Duncan Selbie from Public
Health England says, homes, jobs and social connections lie at the heart of
wellbeing and health, and if ‘co-production’ is key to the development of
‘healthy’ services and communities, how ready and willing are we to let the
‘inmates’ run the ‘asylum’? Are we prepared to remove all the chains?
Alistair Sinclair is a director of the UK Recovery Federation,
www.ukrf.org.uk
VOICES OF RECOVERY
TAKING OVER
THE ASYLUM
Are we ready to embrace truly service user led
services, asks
Alistair Sinclair