About this series

This series of blog posts first appeared a few years ago on a now defunct blog called ‘Care Training’. It was inspired by the training maxim of ‘making the unconscious conscious’. It is intended to take what really ought to be the most basic principles of health and social care and put them down on paper. The series isn’t only an exercise in stating the obvious though whatever the title might suggest. It’s actually intended as a philosophical foundation manual for workers and informal carers to help them get their care ‘on track’ and then to keep it that way.

Many of the ‘glimpses’ only become obvious once they are explained. Until then they appear ‘counter-intuitive’. To put that more simply they seem to make no sense at all to people not used to thinking in this way.

The real aim then is to help people to examine and in many cases change their basic approach to people who need their support.

As always I’d be grateful for feedback on the ‘privileged glimpses’, either by Email or though comments on the blog.

Contents

There is no ‘us and them’

People are just people

People do the best they can with what they’ve got

Coping skills develop slowly

Don’t expect your service user to perform perfectly. You don’t so why should they?

Don’t blame people with disorders for behaving like people with disorders

What people say may not be what they mean

Do as I do – model behaviours we want to encourage in others

Lapse and relapse – two different things

Sympathy is not usually helpful

Risk-free is impossible. Manageable risk is the way to go

Don’t flap

The saviour fantasy

You’re probably not an emergency service – don’t try to behave like one

Hanged if you do & hanged if you don’t – a duty of care myth

The word ‘support’ is meaningless in and of itself

Challenging behaviour means….

Learned behaviour

Unhelpful thinking

“It’s just behavioural” – a workers’ excuse for lazy thinking about service users’ needs.

Who put us in charge?