Tuesday, 10 April
I returned from Cape Town expecting to be
walking through snow, but instead found a beautiful spring day in
Manchester. The Easter weekend gave me a chance to catch up
with family, the garden and the news.
I see the Care Quality Commission has come
in for yet another battering. I have brought together all
parts of the College who are working with
the CQC so we can ensure we are doing our best to help them drive
up quality and minimise risk. Dealing with acute and ongoing
concerns is no easy task for anyone, but quality and risk are
everyone's business.
I saw that Lord Rix's 'lament' received
little media coverage. According to
The Telegraph, he is dismayed by the way children are
all too often resorting to words like 'spastic', 'retard' and
'cretin' as terms of abuse, and blames the influence of social
networking sites as "there are no norms of behaviour in
cyberspace".
Over many years, the College has developed
many innovative projects to help reverse the tide of stigma and
abuse. These have been co-ordinated through various College
campaigns, led by the Director of Communications and Policy Deborah
Hart and her team, and reliant on the hard work and invaluable
input of many of our members. So maybe it's time to look again at
this issue, and how we can reach out to young people through their
preferred social communication routes - or else we risk the
progress that has been made in fighting stigma and
discrimination being reversed. If you have any thoughts of how we
can do this via our new 'Resilience and Recovery' campaign, please
let me know by emailing your message to the Website
Manager, who will be pleased to upload it to the website.
I'm very much looking forward to our
Honorary Fellows dinner this evening. I hope I can answer what are
their searching, but always wise, questions.
Sue
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