Integrate organised a day to explore what people want from their lives and how they can be helped to achieve it. Sue Pemberton reports.
Integrate along with other organisations across the country have been working with Paradigm to help the people they support pursue an ordinary life.
After being part of a national pilot and committing to Pardigm’s aim of ‘an Ordinary Life for All’, Integrate decided to hold a conference for the people they support, their families, support staff, trustees and anyone else with an interest in the organisation.
The day was entitled ‘Your day, your say’ and was planned with a number of Integrate’s Quality Checkers (individuals who receive a service but also check the quality of the services Integrate provide to others), a team leader, a manager, several senior project workers and the CEO.
Integrate have always believed that values have to be demonstrated throughout the organisation so it was planned to be a day with joint facilitation and participation from all involved. ‘Ordinary Lives’ needs the support of the management team to succeed so having some of the senior managers committed to it helps to spread the importance of the message round the organisation.
Apprehensive
We were apprehensive that people would not turn up so it was gratifying that 69 people came along to make their voices heard about the support they receive and how things could be improved.
Cafe style discussions took place with lots of drawing and visuals to highlight individuals’ understanding, first about what support is and then about good support. People wrote or drew their own message on a sunray and attached it to our sun expressing what good support meant to them. We had to extend the sun as there were far too many sunrays to place around one sun.
Many of the comments were positive. Good support is:
“Planning things together and working as a team”
“Staff are polite and helpful”
“They listen to me”
“Staff help make things fun and enjoyable”.
It was heartening to know that people think they receive good support and have the opportunity to develop their lives.
After a break for a pie and peas lunch, followed by some lovely cream cakes, we went on to demonstrate, using role-play, good and not so good support. Armed with green cards for good support and red for not so good, the role-play was accompanied by lots of cheering and booing, showing that people have a pretty good idea of what they want from a support worker.
People moved from table to table, giving them the opportunity to discuss their ideas with as many people as possible. Finally, circles were placed on the floor and people chose the six most important things they felt we needed to follow up.
A positive development was that several people came forward to be part of a focus group to continue the work.
Team leaders, manager and staff were told in no uncertain terms that next year the Quality Checkers group, along with the new task group, will be facilitating the next event.
Everyday ups and downs
This was a remarkable day, giving people a voice and demonstrating who knows best about the support someone needs and receives – the person themselves. It was interesting but not surprising that people don’t want anything different from you or me in their lives, just an ‘ordinary life’ with the everyday ups and downs we all experience. They just want some help to cope with it or indeed some help to make it happen.
The new task group meets monthly, following up actions from the conference and then developing their own terms of reference. The group uses the ‘Doughnut’ Person Centred Tool‘ to show what are and what are not their responsibilities as a group.
Several of the group attended the My Life conference at Ribby Hall near Blackpool in January and have grown in confidence at presenting, representing and feeding back to groups of people, expressing their views and speaking up for others.
We hope we are making a difference and that this is the start of people having more autonomy and more of a say in creating their ‘ordinary lives’.
Sue Pemberton is CEO of Integrate and a Community Living adviser.
