Social Services Research Group Scotland held an event in June at CoSLA HQ in Edinburgh – ‘Person-Centred Care: the effective use and dissemination of Knowledge’ (you can see the flyer here. I was at the event, which provided an interested range of underpinning research and practice examples, both from Scotland and England. I grabbed a number [...]

This morning I was at a workshop at Suffolk Family Carers in Claydon, which looked at Self Directed Support and Direct Payments. Chris Pyburn and David Pintilie from Suffolk Adult and Community Directorate led the workshop, which included an overview from David on the policy background, and also a look at the latest Needs Assessment [...]

I was in Suffolk last week at a meeting of their SDS Implementation Network. Chris Pyburn, whom we’re working with on the Suffolk Stakeholder Engagement project, had set up in the corner a board game produced by In Control. ‘My Life, My Budget’, is, according to In Control, ‘a fun and interactive, cool and colourful [...]

I was at Newmarket’s Rowley Mile Racecourse last Friday, at an event organised by Dyllis Faife for the Joint Improvement Partnership/ADASS/Improvement East. It was aimed at providers working in a number of local authorities in the east of the country, and featured a number of speakers and workshops. There were policy overviews and perspectives from [...]

I was at a workshop yesterday at the King’s Fund, jointly organised by the UK Faculty of Health Informatics and Sue White, Professor of Social Work at the University of Lancaster, who is also a member of the Social Work Task Force. The workshop was aimed at one particular area raised by the Task Force’s [...]

Whilst it has its detractors, Twitter can prove an invaluable tool for keeping up to date with a lot of people quite easily. One of the people I ‘follow’ on Twitter is David Wilcox, of SocialReporter, who has been promoting innovative use of technology in and by the community for many, many years. I met him [...]

It’s been a busy week, but we’re very pleased to go live with the new CareKnowledge designs. A couple of months ago we rolled out our new email design, which was well-received. One minor nuisance with the email was that something in the new design was causing a problem for a small number of our users. After [...]

Mark Watson wrote a new blog post: Managing at the Front Line – it’s a Breeze!

When we set up CareKnowledge back in 2002, we were very pleased to establish a relationship with Pavilion Publishing, and license some of their content. Having spent many years running the National Institute for Social Work Library, their journals always stood out to me as providing articles with a real focus on management and practice [...]

  6 months ago · View

Mark Watson wrote a new blog post: Doing a Stockport …. in Suffolk

You’ll have seen a number of posts in this blog about the work we’re doing in Stockport on their Stakeholder Engagement programme. We’re pleased to be beginning work with Suffolk Adult and Community Services on an engagement programme for them. I’m particularly pleased, as Suffok is 15 miles up the road from where I live, [...]

  6 months, 4 weeks ago · View

Mark Watson wrote a new blog post: Socialising Internal Communications

I mentioned a couple of posts back the UKGovCamp2010 and the session on Social Internal Communications, which I ‘helped’ with. I feel a bit guilty now, as what with Kim from COI facilitating the session, Sharon O’Dea has put together an excellent summary of the session on her blog.  You will see reference [...]

  7 months, 2 weeks ago · View

Mark Watson wrote a new blog post: Socialising Internal Communications

I mentioned a couple of posts back the UKGovCamp2010 and the session on Social Internal Communications, which I ‘helped’ with. I feel a bit guilty now, as what with Kim from COI facilitating the session, Sharon O’Dea has put together an excellent summary of the session on her blog.  You will see reference [...]

  7 months, 2 weeks ago · View

Mark Watson wrote a new blog post: Care and Support website enhancement

I was pleased to be able to chat to Simon Dickson on the UKGovCamp2010 last Saturday, and contribute to his session which looked at Wordpress as a platform for communication and engagement websites for government. He works primarily in central government, and he has just posted on his blog about the lastest enhancements [...]

  7 months, 2 weeks ago · View

Mark Watson wrote a new blog post: Care and Support website enhancement

I was pleased to be able to chat to Simon Dickson on the UKGovCamp2010 last Saturday, and contribute to his session which looked at Wordpress as a platform for communication and engagement websites for government. He works primarily in central government, and he has just posted on his blog about the lastest enhancements [...]

  7 months, 2 weeks ago · View

Mark Watson wrote a new blog post: UKGovCamp 2010

UKGovCamp2010 was held on Saturday 23rd January 2010 at Google HQ, and I was there.
I’ll have to do a bit of explaining, and apologies if I get anything wrong, as a lot of the following is new to me!
As you will see from the wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcamp BarCamp is an international network of [...]

  7 months, 2 weeks ago · View

Mark Watson wrote a new blog post: UKGovCamp 2010

UKGovCamp2010 was held on Saturday 23rd January 2010 at Google HQ, and I was there.
I’ll have to do a bit of explaining, and apologies if I get anything wrong, as a lot of the following is new to me!
As you will see from the wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcamp BarCamp is an international network of [...]

  7 months, 2 weeks ago · View

Mark Watson wrote a new blog post: CareKnowledge – new email design

We’re sending out the first CareKnowledge emails using our new design.
The design is intended to make it easier for you to get to grips with the latest additions to CareKnowledge. We’re still providing highlights, but there are other areas of the email which are designed to profile other important content. We’ve also now got a [...]

  7 months, 3 weeks ago · View