If Not Now When?
At the tenth Board Meeting of the Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust on Tuesday the 28th September 2006, also the day of the Trust's AGM , the full Board unanimously agreed Chief Executive Fiona Edwards recommendations to :
1. Acknowledge that the decision-making process around the modernisation of work services and its outcomes had been far from satisfactory and had adversely impacted on people who attend work services and their families and carers.
2. Write a letter of apology to every individual affected by the cessation of therapeutic payments
3. Re-instate therapeutic payments across the Trust with effect from 1st June 2006 (or the date on which the payments were stopped) , that is to reinstate and backdate them.
The Trust now seems to be dragging its heels on committing to what it very publicly agreed to do so perhaps we should start pushing for the Trust to pay interest on the money it owes to its service users to focus minds.
Similarly, the Board agreed that the Trust should :
• Assess activities undertaken and develop guidelines to differentiate between ‘work’ (for which the NMW or higher will apply), ‘therapy’, ‘training’ or ‘voluntary work’ (for which no payment, other than expenses, will apply).
• Undertake individual assessments on those attending in order to ensure that payment for attending ‘work’ does not adversely impact on benefit.
• Ensure that the work centres remain viable with any increased cost associated increased payments for work undertaken. Any change will be subject to further consultation.
Fiona also agreed to discuss these issues with members of this campaign and yet there are still outstanding and unanswered FOIA questions about investigations into how assessments have been carried out to date , into whether the Trust has even been acting lawfully in the way it has been dealing with some workers at all and about how ongoing planning and consultation with service users and carers needs to be carried out in a more open and honest way.
If the Trust wishes to drag its heels on what it has already agreed to do and to retreat behind ruthless Corporate Affairs Managers ,expensive Damage Control Consultants and slippery Lawyers to wrangle out of things perhaps we should dig our heels in, and start thinking about how we can get legal and other expert advice onside in our campaign to get Justice for the Surrey & Borders Workers.
posted by simply human @ 12:15 pm
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Good idea to suggest to S&B that it should pay the workers interest on the backpayment money and enhanced interest on the delay time.
The decision to reverse the decision has - like every other decision this Trust makes - been made without thought and - again as always - the people who have to implement the reversed decision are not the people who have made it. So Jo Young has (I think) been given a virtually impossible task because she is merely following orders, or trying to. At the PPIF meeting I think she said the letters of apology hadn't even been signed by Fiona Edwards.
I'd suggest to the Campaign that you target people who were actually in the room when the public promises were made. Particularly David Tombs and Roshan Bailey. And ask them why they aren't following up the implementation of these promises.
David has been a member of UKsurvivors for nearly three years but he may not be receiving email directly. His email can be found by doing a djtombs search in the membership of that board.
Roshan Bailey appears from what Des has written on the blog since the Board meeting, to have been the only person on the board who made any comments on the day. Her interests are listed on the S&B biography section of the Trust site and she is down in the minutes early on as declaring an interest being a trustee of the Mary Frances Trust as that Trust runs Leatherhead Clubhouse and are planning to bid to work from the Trust. She is also one of the Hospital Managers for the Trust (ie she hears appeals from patients against compulsory detention).
Rosemary in Surrey
It wont hurt to approach David Tombs to ask him to find out why no official apologies or reinstatements of payment have been made yet but the people we should actually be targetting for answers are the people who recommended and/or agreed to do this - Fiona Edwards , SABP Board members - including Roshan Bailey - and the people responsible for overseeing them on the various PCT's and the South East Coast SHA.
I'll write to ask David.
As for Roshan, if she is involved with developing the Clubhouse model as well there is even more reason for campaigners to write to her because as well as pressing SABP to give real wages and jobs to service users who are willing, stable enough and able to work we have also also pressed for an end to the coercive and useless training and employment schemes ( like the one the Richmond Fellowship wants the Old Moat Garden Centre for ) that create jobs and salaries for training and employment consultants but bugger all for anyone else.
I first highlighted one such scheme in Surrey well over a year ago, it receives almost a quarter of a million pounds per year in funding and its totally f******** useless.
I personally think money and resources should be targetted into getting people who can and want to work into real jobs that need doing anyway (i.e. not the user involvment crap ) and getting the money thats currently being wasted on user involment and corecive and useless training and employment schemes ploughed back into providing quality day services and activties for service users for whom work isnt an option.
We should be fighting together for better treatment , care and support services for everyone .
There are plenty of things the subsidies for these 'make disabled people work for free'schemes could go on to really help people. Only today on the list a woman has written that when asked what would help her she said a few hours a week assistance with her children each week only to be told 'oh we don't do that anymore.' Someone else has been trying to get direct payments for acupuncture which he finds helpful but can't get it and certainly can't get the right help to get it sorted out so he does get direct payments. Someone else said there are big gaps in help for people who have been abused. People have a lot of needs which are not being met and yet all this money is spent subsidising these what I consider should be illegal workschemes that just exploit the disabled people who have to work for nothing in them. If they were for non disabled people then they would definitely be illegal so why is it different for us?
As for SABP we will have to keep chaseing them up and make sure they know we are watching closely every move they make.
I think that's right about more effective use of subsidies Jill, as sometimes all we are talking about is providing basic assistance and support to help people stabilise themselves and their situation as much as they can .
Instead of this happening, we are all paying to support NIMHE and the corrupt and useless MH charities stabilise their media profiles, salaries and bank accounts and fast reaching the point where the ' revolving door ' patient is becoming the norm, only the revolving door is almost permanently locked now with various excuses posted on it:
' Closed for service while we reinvent ourselves as a Foundation Trust'
'Closed for service while we train our staff in assest management and disposal skills ',
and
' Closed for service because employing and managing ourselves has become an end in itself and we simply dont give a shit'
For many people access to services is now a locked revolving door spinning in perpetual motion.
You know, I've supported someone else with MH issues over the last year and they've gone from a position of being suicidal , staying in bed all day and never leaving the house to getting out and about a bit more and taking much better care of themselves.
The cost?
Time mostly.
This campaign arose around out of the way the Old Moat Garden Centre Workers were treated by the Surrey & Borders NHS Trust and that's a huge ongoing battle in its own right but it is still a part of the wider fight to improve services and choices for everyone , what we now need is people to push as hard for their own areas of concern as we, on our own cannot cover all the bases .
Well the good news is that the letters of apology and reinstatement of payments have been made to the people at the Geesemere (which is in North Surrey, my part). These were payments made to learning disabled people who attended and were paid wages for what they did. This is not like the Garden Centre, a commercial enterprise. The Manager at Geesemere told me that this had happened last Thursday, 5 October - so the same day as our North Surrey FoCUS meeting.
The Manager at Geesemere says they are very happy with the situation at the moment. The reason that the North Surrey FoCUS knew about Geesemere is that an email and details of a user group meeting about payments had come to the NS FoCUS meeting on 10 July, prior to the first main FoCUS meeting on 25 July. So that is what went to the FoCUS meeting, and the Garden Centre was added to that.
I imagine that the letters and backpayments have now been made to whoever else was affected.
Rosemary in Surrey
On second thoughts, I've got no idea if and when the payments and letters have gone to people other than at Geesemere.
However, as the people concerned have learning disabilities, there will either be professional or family carers closely involved. I would have thought Joan Mulcaster from Surrey Online (who wrote the story in May) would be able to check whether the father of the man at the Garden Centre is satisfied with what is happening now.
Rosemary in Surrey
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