Sunday, August 31, 2008

Mental Health : Be Patient For They Will Even Cremate Themselves


"Crying The Tears Of Helpless Flame"
In memory of Jonathon Brannan Aged 28

By Silvis Rivers (Shared With UserWatch)

You cannot strike back
At the clever NHS
And its slick match pack

But you can cry with
The tears of flame

You can hold up the arms
Of new holocaust walkers
Smoking and dead

On our serviceless
Oven-boards of shame .


Case No. 2

National Death Services

Jonathon Brannan Aged 28 Death by Fire And The Trust's Surpluses


"Can you stand by when people run past in flames , or are a pile of steams and fires ?" - This was said by the bad Samaritan with a financial grin who worked for the NHS Boards of executives in the UK National Health Mental Health Services .

Joe Samaritan of course, and his relatives, had changed . Now he believed greater good could be done by depriving people of cool water tears along with supportive help that over a long time might have calmed some of their painful inner fires .

While Joe prospered as you know like folks on the hill do, Jonathon could not wait for a service anymore His anguish and inner life reached for another liquid which was not so cool . In March 2008 he burned himself alive in Bradford UK by pouring thinners over himself . The Coroner said his death was preventable . His local Mental Health Trust was on target to make a "surplus" of £550k

I'll pick up the post from UKsurvivors which was done in response to a newspaper article (Bradford Telegraph and Argus ) posted by Cyndy. This is a post which promotes a rough correlational "tool" of : "Surpluses made set against patient's needs who die and are deprived of care " .....In UserWatch's recent article about Service User Colville Mark's (Camden London) death it was shown the local Islington based Mental Health Trust was on track to make a surplus of £1.75 million yet Colville had along with 49 other patients been "unallocated" services .


UKSurvivors Post


Case 2 Fireball dad 'could have been saved'. (The Silvis RoughToolkit applied)

In the case (2) of Jonathon Brannan aged 28 - this poor guy burned himself alive in March 2008. Cyndy (Uksurvivors) copied the report from the "socially concerned" Bradford Telegraph - right lets have a look at this and apply the Silvis tool of "Surpluses made - set against deprivation of serious care" (there are a couple of extra points here too a bit later about NIMHE costs .

Questions :

1. Did his local Trust run at a surplus in the relevant period of his death ?

2. Were their indications he needed serious care ?

Answers :


1.

(From the Trust's internal finance report 2007 - 8 )

QUOTE :

  1. "OVERVIEW OF FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE


For the eight months ended the 30th November 2007 the Trust is reporting a surplus of £983k; a favourable variance of £635k compared to the planned position at the end of November. On the basis of current performance and the assumptions within the year end forecast, the Trust is projecting that it will make a surplus of income over expenditure of £550k at the end of the financial year. This is in line with the financial plan approved by the Trust Board in March 2007.

A summary of the Trust's financial performance at the end of November 2007 is provided in Appendix A. "



2.


"Mr Whittaker, [Coroner] who is writing to health minister Alan Johnson and chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson, said he believed 28-year-old Jonathan Brannan's death would have been prevented if there had not been a delay in getting him assessed by a community psychiatrist nurse."


So there we have it Jonathon's death was preventable according to a Coroner . Slow assessment equals "NO Care" . Why ?

Because lean-finance practice at Trusts pressured to make surpluses in the bid for the new waves of "Foundation status" (or to clear, artificial "debt" ) equals more staff rationing (cost control) per potential patient seen .

Boiled down it actually equals NHS MH Trusts shaving off costs where they can and they mainly do that on staff ratios and that emerges in restricted inflow of patients seen .

In this Bradford Case of Jonathon Brannan we have a further gems of knowledge buried in the latest Trust financial reports

Take this :

Part of NIMHE was ceding its budget over to Bradford District MH Care Trust and that was

£1,400,000 for the year 2007 - 8 (set against a banked amount the Trust carried for NIMHE from the DOH of £6,747,000)

Its difficult to see completely into this Trust like others for the amount of Users they are employing to become the "voices" of others . In others words the costs of the Inhouse-User-economy-bubble factor But like other Trust's it is Top-Down controlled with the twin weave of mystifying policy objectives going right the way through it , as well as very poor demystification of its financial language ..

But Jonathon's death was inside a larger social context which helped to kill him by neglect when he could no longer bear what was inside his feelings and mind ..There was nothing to cool his state. So he burst into fire ..

NIMHE with its service-user-bureacracy need scrapping - they are rolling out bullshit meetings and more civil servants and Jonathon could have done with a Bradford team to assess him. My estimate is it another would have cost less that a third of that amount : 1.4 million . The Trust saved money but they did not save Jonathon .

As a comparison of the costs of a team Birmingham and Solihull MH Trust ran a team of 45 staff for serious BPD conditions for about 2.4 million .....

This is the begininng of a public dossier perhaps ...? It needs a number of people on it though .. Any takers ? Every now and then perhaps ? Just set the Audit Commission's reports of the MH Trusts against patient dead in the same account years for those who needed care and never got it . Trusts are also creating access to the financial board papers although it would not surprise me if DOH spies would not look in on this potential route of emarrasment and find some way to skew transparency . This is the kind of thing they can do because this is a very politically driven organisation .

Silvis rivers Aug 2008




Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Mental Health Teddy Helps Create New UserWatch Logo

UserWatch can announce that Mental Health User consultation with the office Teddy, Harvey and friends has resulted in a photoshop colour party from which two characters innocently emerged. In keeping with duplicity like nasty NHS Trust's who are really soul alligators who have shiny toothpaste logo's etched all over their pointy bits, we too have decided on a duplicitously wonderfully kind duo ...

Yeah in duck egg green skies where fairies fly about ..Tragic and magic are related so the fairies told us

NHS Trusts we want you to know teddy type spirits are watching you closely for where you really put the honey ....




Silvis Rivers Designed (while eating sweets)


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Mental Health Anti Date Rape Parrot Cream Backed By Dragon's Den

USERWATCH INVESTIGATES

When UserWatch UK investigated and interviewed the self confessed mental health wizard of cheek Silvis Rivers, we had no idea what to expect ...(well we did actually we knew we were in for a cheeking and probably total bullshit )

Accusations appeared (See Here) to be levelled at Silvis Rivers derived a posting on Uksurvivors that a defamatory cartoon had been posted of someone who looked like a pirate and a text allegedly had accompanied which implied serial rape ... We could not figure all this out so with our hacker contacts and inside Yahoo mates we had a further look and sure enough serial anal rape of parrots may have been implied. No humans however were harmed in the molestation by pirates ..

Silvis though, shaking , claimed to UserWatch :

"After grinning ...er ... sinning I knew I had to make amends and soothe matters so with some rescued anally raped parrots we embarked on a business idea . I had no idea it would get the backing of the Dragons Den entrepreneurs and the secret help of one now reformed Pirate who contritely claimed his besmirched reputation needed unsmirching secretly for his conscience ...

UserWatch interviewed the parrots and this is what they had to say ...





Userwatch can endorse this new product like the Dragons Den wiz-bizzies did recently and we show it below - but not because we have tried it !

OH NO ! We would never do that . We sent our abused office sparrow in for that ..

We can endorse too that madness is still alive and unwell amongst the mad out here in community madland , yes , in amongst the scream-trees where the parrots are now safe with ear protectors on ..


Monday, August 25, 2008

Mental Health : The Strange Tale Of Scuffles And Pirates

Of Parrots And Pirates


A strange tale occurs lately on the UKSurvivors forum - the home of the marginalised in UK Mental Health survivory. We had a look at various posts after a blogger named Bob claimed he was accused of being a serial rapist accompanied by a cartoon. We suspected Kakatoo the UserWatch cartoonist of being involved - especially as parrots are involved ...





The cartoon :



The Text :


"Complaints are coming in that drugged parrots in South Yardley have against their will been tattooed by a bandana-ed man known as Pirate Bob ...

"Pucy Green" one of the parrots said :

"Bob gave us all drink and when we woke up Bob had tatooed our bibs - we think he took advantage of us for self promotion and some of us are having our anuses checked too because we think date rape drugs were used on us "

"Yellow Feather" said :

"I have been itching badly at my rear end and I vaguely recall Bob screaming orgasmically :

"I am having some COCK-in-too"

"He told us he was seeking to create worldwide Parroty but now we have Bob's Bibs and aching anuses ..."

The RSPCA commented : " Parrots should not be tatooed or date raped"

Police in South Yardley have gone to Shard End Pool where there is said to be an small island chain and secret drugs hideout.

They have issued a warning to all parrots in the Bham area:

"If you get Bibbed by Bob you might get Knobbed too - report it to us ".


Bob wrote in a subsequent post : "I LIKE IT



Bob's Post


We have no idea what the rest of the scuffle is about but we want to ask Bob why he can reverse the sense of the truth in his posts so quickly about alleged parrot-rape ? . "I like it" in our book means "I like it" .....

We agree accusations of serial parrot rape are shocking and so terrible we too are heaving , but no they are not on par with human rape Bob, which unfortunately you've implied and for someone who can write as well you can, that has to be for effect doesn't it?

.

Mental Health Parroty Leads To Corporate Policy Caging




There are fears in Wales that all Mental Health Trusts may be merged into a one Wales Trust . It appears to us at UserWatch that this will lead to gross parroty. Parrots of course repeat things across all times and places pretty much the same way.. Far from Service Users singing more freely from their caged conditions they are largely dominated by Govt's Upper-parrot-policy repeating things like "anti-stigma" - "anti-stigma" (even as the system denies Users supports and treatment choices) and "Work is good for you" - "Work is good for you" (despite poor supports - little inreach strategy of decent training grants, and no or little choices of treatment) ......Central planning has dominated the UK MH scene and "modernisation" has been dominated by a skewed version of User-empowerment. In other words : find those who will parrot the system and claim they represent the rest.. The parrots it appears have it ..

What does Wales have to say of a one merged mental health-trust ?

"Aug 25 2008 by Jonathan Morgan, Western Mail(From Wales Online)

Having a single organisation approach will create more problems than it solves, says Jonathan Morgan, as he calls for a rethink on service delivery

HEALTH Minister Edwina Hart announced the outcome of the review into mental health services led by Professor Michael Williams in June.

His thorough review of the way that we plan and provide for mental health services followed a raft of concerns from politicians, clinicians, service users and bodies who felt that we had not paid enough attention to mental health services.

I welcomed this review at the time and the “blue skies thinking” that emerged as a major contribution to an issue that concerns me personally.

One of the reasons why I have been pursuing the devolution of powers to Wales to allow us to legislate in the field of mental health is because of its Cinderella status.

The Joint Parliamentary Committee into the UK Mental Health Bill in 2004 concluded that services in Wales were less developed than elsewhere in the UK.

I suppose this was their polite way of saying that things in Wales were pretty dreadful in comparison.

Bizarrely, there are two very good strategies that should improve the services for people with mental illness. Firstly the Adult Mental Health National Service Framework outlines a range of access to services that would improve the assessment of patients’ needs, treatment and care, emergency cover and advocacy.

On paper the plan looks robust, in practice it is flimsy."


But does mental health have a Cinderally status ? What does that mean really ? That it is kept impoverished ?

At UserWatch we really wonder about this because we think the trail of money that is used, is not reaching the patient in care needs. Needless rotating crisis based on poor support is still occurring whilst at the same time extra health bureaucracy has been formed and has been parroting policy for years . The newer layers of ex-service users and other "staff innovators" recruited for user-bureaucracy like NIMHE. appear to be merging into the Strategic Health Authority in the West Mids . They have served their purpose of endorsing the will of a Govt afraid to truly go to the people and endorse what they needed in Patient Choice . Instead NIMHE were turned to the will of the D0H-DWP axis to put "work first" ..

There can be no independence though that is not first underpinned by supporting dependency in a way that actually sees its individual issues and responds to them accurately ...For too many a circle of being deprived of good human help is the reality . The State have made it so .

We are years away from being even close to addressing social and emotional reasons for many MH damaged people's personality problems and altering states of mind .

Constantly drugging people though, is still refrigeration of social problems internalised in them and echoed into endless invalidity by a system that wishes to keep people away from supported reflection and the aided emotional journeys of being able to tolerate more of what they are ..

The job of reflection is hard and emotionally painful. The Self wins itself back only slowly from pain in decent therapies . Reflection when deeply helped is however giving up drugged parrothood and slowly other repeating states of what is at base emotional helpessness that genuinely needs new languages of personal navigation . Personal navigation is uniquely unparrotlike ..But the State you will understand prefers parrots .....


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Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Sainsbury's Centre For Mental Health : Pathways To Hell


Image By Silvis Rivers (Copyright)


So far we have seen the much vaunted "modernisation propaganda" about Mental Health services include praising getting rid of the asylums (turning them into homes for the middle classes and use by property speculators) , creating "community care" (social disappearance locally) and the policies of "Social Inclusion" (the creating of selective inclusion of fitter Users in Trusts to create new limted treatment diverting bureuacracies ) .

We have also seen a rise in the amount of self medication (over 100% ) across the whole UK using illicit drugs and deaths because of it . There has also been a rise in the prison population of mental health Users and those with MH problems .

Sainsbury's Centre For Mental Health one of the midwives for NIMHE and CSIP (Care Services Improvement Partnership ) has been one of the main architects of all this including "Pathways To Work" which for some are becoming "Pathways to Hell ".

By overarching the patient's needs and treatments shaped directly by "Patient Choice" and trying to turn Mental Health Users into socially engineered work fodder, the Govt have designed a kind of hell for many Users who cannot fit into society . Trusts have been encouraged to become "Lean" and this has meant even more disappearance of patients into community Zeroland or the existential treatmentless corner . We have noted though that those Users who work for Trusts and Staff too appear to get better treatments or attention .

The word "Lean" now has entered the NHS admin-class lexicon . Language for that admin class is just another way to conceal truth and misery . Prostituting health to politics . The Health Service Journal promote this "Lean" idea too which shows the word now is fashionable amongst the health admin classes :

"Becoming a Lean Champion 2008"




Yet at the bottom of the pile the patient is now increasingly under social engineering assault. The treatments do not fully exist that fit realistic Patient Choices but are made of of ideological CBT soup and other watery dilutions. More dilutions are bound to follow . Big system sovietisation is all, the few tins on the health supermarket shelf attest to that .. But the prize Labour and other politicians will be looking for is to get unfit people off benefits . To create a "working class again" that can supply New Labour with its missing ingredient - a seriously oppressed class ..

The oppression is shaping up though , and Chris Close (Advocate in Darlington) is the first advocate we know, to pointedly state that MH Users are being unfairly assessed off benefits .

One example he chooses to write about shows the sheer bureau-spaghetti knots one person is tied up in through a false medical assessment that they are unlikely to unravel for at least a year if at all . But he says there are others too . Yes, we have known about them and its difficult to dossier it all into something that is so sharp it will stick into the heart of the system . Betrayal of Mental Health Users is built into the system and in Birmingham this is also the case . There are very very few in the services who will put themselves into the firing line for Users because mainly they are paid by the services and its a conflict of interest .

Chris Close wrote in March 2007

Especially when the people concerned cannot work because they are not fit to do so.I am witnessing increased levels of distress amongst clients with mental health issues as they are gradually 'reassessed' by the DWP as not being ill enough to qualify for Incapacity Benefit or for the Disability premium on Income support and told that if they appeal against the 'decision' (which is often arbitrarily made after a medical examination which concentrates on their physical health) they will lose 20% of their benefit whilst appealling! Hardly an encouragement to appeal! The Government target is clearly not to assist the people concerned but to reduce the benefits 'burden'. Often the people concerned have no extended family supports or mechanisms and I fear the development of a system which further marginalises and alienates already marginalised and alienated people. This time they are not being marginalised by their own ill health but by a Government which it seems to me has no capacity to care for the vulnerable.

Chris Close
Advocacy Manager Comment first posted: 21 Feb 06

In August 2008 (18th) he writes :

"I have spoken to the DWP office today about a specific client whose situation is thgat despite being diagnosed by his own Consultant Psychiatrist as suffering from Bipolar Disorder (Manic Depression a reactive severe mood swing condition he has now been "de-recognised" as suffering from that condition after a laregly physical examination by a Benefits Agency Doctor "

Pathways To Work for some will be a pathway to personal hell because the sloppy system favours not rigour and real supportive treaments to get people back to some real creative contribution, but bureaucratic power .

This policy slop is designed deliberately though - with its lack of rigourous coherent law that protects the individual - and that shows the need that politicians have for unaccountability to drive "change" through . Labour are anti individual, and are system driven with a need to preserve the massive admin class which gives them power. From the split up of complaints processes in Social Care and Health with two differing Statutory Instruments (2004 and 2006) and multi layers to be negotiated, even though Service Users could and have been using both services, to the way they have created new layers of treatment diverting bureacracy.

They have not missed an opportunity to quite frankly fuck the individual up unless they could recruit them into the system itself .


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Sunday, August 17, 2008

Let Us Bray To The Board - User Ass Spotted - Mental Health Exclusive





A Kakatoo Cartoon Again August 2008


Pinning The Tale On The Ass


The evangelical anti-stigma streak in Mental Health continues, with some national charities Rethink and MIND, together with architects like Mental Health Foundation are all about to lower the persuasion hooks and sell a new vision of mental illness that will be embedded with the need to work and be tolerated by all. Seig Heil .

Mini hangers-on too like Mental Health Media and the great matrix architect Sainsbury Centre For Mental Health, are all about to stick more anti-stigma images to us in approx Oct 2008 , when the £18 million they were granted from the lottery and Comic Relief fills the coffers of the London media mind changers ...Someone is making money then from the image game ......Yeah... usually the London media circles selling us their latest fashions for a while ..

Its a pity these bands and networks are not better exposed for the money-sucking circles they are . Forget small realistic grants for Service Users for management of their lives creating unique training and support needs .. Other people have swept the possibility of those up in "new services". The Lottery is corrupt and corrupted by being too close to Govt needs .. Its a back door way now to socially engineer and a bit too close to policy objectives ..

Johnny Patient does not know best . Everyone else does, that was supported by the Govt push to create a strange burgeoned growth of Mental Health bureaucracy of Users and others that frankly should see many of them doing real work rather than making paper piles from the NHS meetings cultures.

Even the problems of roll outs of Direct Payments (helping some Users with allowances lead more socially included lives ) was held up by local Councils across the UK and it all needed penalties in law for a lack of will to create ways forwards .

That struggle was left to Users and awkward bureaucracy to push it forwards but where oh where is strong law on this ? Forget it, Labour screwed complaints processes up - split them up in Social Care and Health so they had different standards and multiple layers to be encountered. They were used in anti-accountability way . That was planned .

Equally PPI Forums were supposed to be weaker versions of the CHC's because in practice they lost control over viewing-in on statutory advocacy services and making them account to them by direct control over their reporting systems . Labour screwed that up too .. Independent Complaint and Advocacy Services (ICAS) have become split off from the public experience substantially and not truly localised but seperately controlled by the new bureau-sectorite industries Labour have favoured.

The User Voice is now bureacratised across the UK in all but a few places . Corporo-speke is all and many Users too have lost touch in the semi sovietised NHS supply of treaments with the simple lost idea that they should have supply side control over their recovery treatments. The negotiation is one way around . Bureau know best . Sieg ! The Bureauland !

Its beans on the shelf with some chemical additives and Users get to choose which additives they leave out or want added......

A new Ass though has appeared at various levels of the NHS Trusts . Its Brays To The Board ..Its made up of herds of hangers on of ex Users and now Governors of Foundation Trusts - trained up by the very NHS Trust Executives that are the Govt's strings ...

"Oh Board thou art a great and wonderful place to slip around in the greases and straws "- some Assess have said .....(Pigs have migrated to China to make money)

The new windmills are being built on Orwell and Animal Wards across the UK . They say some donkeys still exist as shadows, behind those wallpapers with anti stigma slogans painted on them .

They are not braying though ....They are the donkey-ghosts they say ......

UserWatch will bray for them ..........HeeeeeeeeeHawwwwwwwwwwwww......

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Friday, August 15, 2008

Mental Health Bureaucratisation, Choice and LINks





BY SILVIS RIVERS

As the new LINKs (Local Involvement Networks) falsely bloom into doom and drop dead petals on the graves of the Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) Forums so the march of the DOH that along with some Trust CEO's hated the PPI's (because some were becoming effective) is becoming cockier and more assured ...It certainly is in Bham with a new NHS connected Host being chosen for the LINks that has "NHS-connected" rubber stamped all over it and which has many of its staff still being heavily networked into the NHS ..The con was that the NHS connected Community Interest Company "Gateway Family Services" (South Bham based) was eligible to bid for the Host position if it had (under EU laws) two years of accounts .. Well it did . In reality it had only formed in Feb 2006 and it out-competed another organisation which had a track record of many more years of effective and truly arms length community engagement.

The past several years have seen the growth of Patient-User-bureaucracy in mental health services which has high-jacked the financial development of direct User-Choice and a viable supported robust front-line economy of that . Costly NIMHE and CSIP led cross organisational orgies called "meetings" sponsored by National MH Charities and Govt have created this unbelievable state of affairs . State supply sides of treatment has been put in the way of everyone too . Those who are psychotic and have serious crisis sycles might have fared a little better with choices of antipsychotics .

I have massive misgivings about the way many people are still excluded (especially in the Personality Disorder "Community") away from being able to get any provision . The total UK spend on PD areas was in 2007 about 9 million .. That's unbelievably small . In Birmingham (2007) nearly 2.5 million was spent seeing only a maximum of 24 people (12 local beds) per year . When I checked this on a number of occasions they were at under-capacity because the pressure was on to save money and make stupid fucking surpluses across the UK for those Trusts becoming Foundation Trusts (who had to qualify for FT status by having a substantial surplus in "their bank") . Some Trusts outside of Birmingham were previosuly purchasing the PD "specialism" that Birmingham offered .

PD is now a topic of change (a push towards community provision) but in Birmingham the proposed change is very tiny because they still wish to hang onto the "specialist unit". This is non-deterministic bollocks really because once you keep people away from good therapeutic support over the longer term they evolve into crisis - hence the false evolution of "specialism" for people who are at base child abused and have suffered shocking attachment experiencies and who often need help navigating massive jags of ascending feelings and partial re-experiences.

These people are not "psychotic" but are usually driven mad enough by what remains as serious imprinted disorder in their emotional and relational capacities .

The Health Service Journal over the past few days has pointed out that some people in broader medicine have been negotiating with their local Primary Care Trusts to "top-up" treatments they need : Cancer Drugs and other applications .

"

Almost all PCTs stated it was their clear policy - following Department of Health guidance - not to allow patients to mix NHS and private funding.

Co-payments

But freedom of information releases from acute trusts indicate that a number have allowed patients to make co-payments to cover the cost of drugs not normally funded by the NHS.

The commissioning manager at one PCT said this could constitute fraud if the PCT was not aware it was going on.

Leeds PCT recently discovered local nursing homes had charged NHS-funded residents a top-up fee. The PCT suspended any additional placements at those homes.

The DH has tasked the national cancer director, Mike Richards, with reviewing policy on top-up payments. It is due to report in October. "


Ivan Lewis the new Secretary of State for health has pointed out that engaging the public in service redesign is the way forwards. Yet the more people and Users I know have involved themselves in the NHS the greater the expectation on them to begin bureau-speke and slowly turn into voluntary civil servants somehow ideally re-possessing the heart of the values of the NHS .

The NHS though is quite frankly an oppressor for many in mental health and its time it was broken over the rack of any elements of Patient Choice . I welcome any mechanism that breaks down the monopoly of the NHS supply sides - that means "top-ups" too . Why ? Because any erosion of the bureacracy in mental health perversely carrying out socially engineering policies (work orientated social inclusion) and diverting resources falsely into new performance engineered very internalised User-bureacracy avoids frontline treatment for many.

User-democracy is simple when peoples get treatment choices that challenge State supply sides too across ALL ranges and particularly in recovery orientated situations .

A colleague was tipped off professionally about statistical returns at a PCT which if captured into the public domain could well have been used critically to show that counselling for many is non-existent and/or the quality of it is questionable .

The tip off was clear : stat-returns definitely existed of people who had counselling set against things like broken appointments . The point was to penetrate what the quality of the supply was, find out if its crudely inhouse and poorly trained, and set it against rough indicators of public confidence . So a Freedom Of Information request was made based on the tip off of the witnessed and seen stats .

The response was no information existed that was robust .....Oh yeah ....So what did exist and is this meat for the Information Commissioner now ? .....Its so fucking hard to penetrate simple local supply questions even for those in the know .. Control over vision is all in the NHS and its chaos .

LINks will be no match either for the NHS chaos because there's too much bullshit idealised cross organisational partnership within the clamping bureau State and not enough clearly boundarised real inspection that will happen ...

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Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Mental Health Discovery Of CIC Maggotry


UserWatch discovers that the Host that has been appointed By Birmingham City Council to run the dregs of the nippy partly untamed PPI Forums (now re-named Local Involvement Networks (LINKs) is a bunch of colourful Birmingham South based CIC maggots ....Green though - pretty too, like five pound note green ...LINKs are to be the wussy-cats of the new "health monitoring public" role ...

CIC's are more fully known as Community Interest Companies and have sadly become the choice of vehicle for the new growing policy writhe of "get em back to work" New Labour State-ish Sector ...Only its not quite like the old State Sector that was more dependably shit and occaisionally but increasingly rarely accountable. CIC's are the new methodism of socially corporatised sloppy socialism ... Like those jolly ol' middle class silly green wellingtons ....Everyone's gone green though now . We know we at UserWatch have ...But then we too are maggoty ....We at least admit our relationship to the Lord of the Flies ...

CIC's are partly being set up because New Labour feared privatisation so they looked for a hybrid philosophy that de-profited profit, increasingly gets rid of the old State and preserved community benefit inside surpluses they can generate .. Most of this hybrid philosophy is being churned into existence by Govt grants and DOH support but also by the new job creation schemes creating job creation schemes creating job creation schemes in the public-corporo-third-sector .....Labour after all need a new oppressed "working class" - mainly to be created from knackered out benefit claimaints and disabled people and the mentally ill ..

Privatisation of health is seen as a privileged evil by Labour yet curiously they divert so many resources away from the still dis-enabled individual into making direct opportunity-robbing bureacracies of one kind or another into the privileged pocketed bureaucrats and corporo-public-sector workers.

What the fuck is wrong with many longer term patients in mental health getting training grants, grants for treatments , disability training they design and shape...Is everyone so helpless they needs armies of new-experts in between their potential choices and the supply, if indeed they ever get choices because of the increasing size of the bureaucracy in the way.

Labour had the debate about everyone else choices in health (mental health particularly with their London friends in the virtually nationalised mental health charities) of how to move forwards and they won it before everyone else opened their mouths .

The top London national charity voices had everyone elses voices and that is what they created in the localities . Organisations named "Patients Voices" but without real choices .

Public and third sector expansion leading from the Govt and NHS top will certainly create a bubble of activity in localities for a time but at what cost to diverting life chances , treatments and other opportunities that people might have created if they had more direct choices ? Maybe a "real" state sector should be about that, distributing the means to choices directly instead of dominating choices and creating job creation bureaucracies because the new Host is actually a public sector Job creation scheme we think in a sector that is seriously overcrowded with bureaucracy



So who is the Host of the yet to be in October New LINKs in Birmingham ? Its Gateway Family Services . Nice little name but behind it all are some people of very senior NHS interests . Cynthia Bower is probably the most senior . She has been a Strategic Health Authority Head in the West Mids and worked at one time for Birmingham Social Services .

Stafford Scott has been involved in Bernie Grant Trust work so probaby knows good ol' Sharon Grant of the heavily criticised CPPIH that was disbanded this year .. stafford.scott@dh.gsi.gov.uk

To quote a ref :

"Joy Warmington From October 07, Joy will be working on a part-time basis for BRAP, which is a Equalities and Human Rights charity based in Birmingham. She has been the organisation’s CEO for the last 5 years. Through this role, Joy has been involved in working on issues of health inequalities both at a leadership level as part of a DOH steering group, and also by working directly with local PCT’s"

The lurch to the South in Bham again in the choice of the Host (the merged mental health Trust in 2003 became dominated by a south Birmingham agenda and south biased MH Trust) with its pc correct race and social inclusion agenda is quite a sell and there is no doubt it has been chosen to balance the ambitions of work-creation with New Labour's agenda of selling it all on the back of the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund (500 Million announced by Hazel Blears earlier this year) .

Slowly however a giant policy fog soup is congealing in the UK and locally in Birmingham and the gamble is it will get people off welfare benefits and make them more healthy by central planning and masses of semi treated mental health issues with a heavy dose of get-back-to-work and become a pseudo-corporo-worker ? What you can see in Gateway Family Services is a social engineering philosophy that is similar to NIMHE's (National Institute of Mental Health Education) "Train the Trainers". You can see this openly on their site as an offered service and in Stafford Scott's Leadership work - but does it cut the mustard ?

At UserWatch we think dis-enabled people must have grants shaped by them directly to fit their socially creative purposes to buy in training and even shape that training around their idiosyncratic lives . Changing them into corporo-sectorites though is bullshit ..Let their be small innovative local grants a-plenty - let them be super promoted as information . Let their be information SIGHT !

Never mind the privileged industries of New Labour social twiddlers ..

We think the underlying failure of this policy is already seedbeded in the lack of trust New Labour have shown in enabled human independence - that would have generated a new social economy . Too many new bureacratic systems are in place like a bad glue around social problems that deserved better individual input by directer means of personal choice . Personal Choice in mental health is now being played with and "eligibilised" to death by the bureau-classes . The main victim has been wider Patient Choices and a financially enabled culture that could grew from that. What happened to Patient Choice in mental health is a theme that happens to individuals more widely where sections of the community benefit from social engineering idealisms by creating their own careers from it ....Bugger the rest in special spirit prisons .

Only truer Patient Choice would have started to undermine the way NHS bureacrats still pins the patient down and dominates them with new models of how to be a working bureaucrat - especially in mental health ..

The Tories have it partly right that the individual makes the best economic choices but they would never allow the means to trickle down to empower that . Labour might have allowed that if they had let go of trying to sustain a monopolistic NHS that cannot let go of the NHS mental health patient beyond crisis and let them liberate their lives into planned and owned creatvity/training. Labour still create in mental health a soviet-type social doom for many. Care in the new Gulag comunity

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