Rosemary Moore has just posted the following message on her Yahoo group Mental Magazine .
Today I got the papers for the Surrey & Borders AGM and Board meeting which will be held on 28 September. They won't be released into the wild (be on the S&B website) until Monday. The papers include an unreserved apology for the decision to stop the payments and for the distress and anxiety caused to those affected. The Chief Executive's recommendation to the Board is that payments be re-instated from the date they were stopped and a letter of apology be sent to "every individual affected by the cessation of the payments". It is noticeable that the patient and public involvement forum (PPIF) is not included in the people who have expressed concern.
This is brilliant news and hats off to Surrey & Borders Chief Executive Fiona Edwards for arriving at what must have been a very difficult and politically loaded decision to personally and professionally distance herself and her Trust from the
'advice and actions of the so called 'modernising' experts from the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health and do what was right for the garden centre workers.
This still leaves the garden centre workers in a precarious position financially - their status and rights as workers are no clearer - and we have yet to see how they fare under the
Richmond Fellowship - please take note Surrey & Borders PPI - so there's still a need for ongoing scrutiny here to see if real jobs , real wages and other real stabilising and supportive non employment based services emerge from this mess or whether services and lives will have been disrupted to suit a few selfish and thoughtless academics from the remorseless
Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health. Well done everyone.