More about collaboration...

In my wilder moments, and drawing upon the unique experience of SCIE and their amazing visual learning approaches, I begin to wonder what formal teaching of medicine, education, planning, social work and associated areas is all about. The game for me is re-exploring the Nineteenth Century concept of Smilesian Self-help and I've not come across a group that does it better. Surely we all learn through apprenticeship models and what over-formal teaching does is simply remove us would-be professionals from thinking about ways in which we relate to people. Let's reinvent the world through blogging and here's COVER's (and my) first challenge. How many of our readers have thought about how we often duplicate each others' work and can any of us produce examples of consciously and reflectively working together? This doesn't mean that we take each other over but it does mean that we would all move on if we thought more about formal, and informal, cooperation.

Health resources

What about GP commissioning? COVER’s recent research shows how many VCS organisations felt that GPs did not understand the links between their work and positive health outcomes. But there are plenty of examples around how employment, benefits advice and unemployment relate to health issues. For example, check out the Bromley by Bow centre.

I don't see psychiatrists speaking openly on British videos. Take a look at a Community Health Centre’s videos in Ontario. This provides fantastic examples of people being enabled to become really involved in thinking about their own illnesses.  As one lady comments 'It's more than about doctors....'

Some American websites thinking aloud about various forms of emotional ill-health seem streets ahead of work 'over here' in terms of visual descriptions and knowledge.

Try healthy place.com for down-to-earth knowledge ranging from Alzheimer's through to depression and bi-polar disorder.

There are some good examples available from over here:

Few videos provide such a detailed account of exploitation, mistreatment and abuse of people who are ageing as on You Tube's Protecting the Dignity of our Older People.

cutmovie.co.uk is a Women's Aid video which can only shock us all as it details ways in which women are abused by men....

We should be especially proud of pioneering work in Cambridge: MakingMentalNotes is a user-led media thinking about mental and emotional health which includes more than relevant videos from Frank and Rachel Bruno and many others.

Benefit Scrounging Scum blog

Readers of this blog will have appreciated, we hope, our admiration for the BenefitScroungingScum blog which, through deliberate irony, is now delivering their visual criticisms of capacity and other benefits in 'Nothing ever happens....and the needle returns to the start of the song'.  These three powerful videos demonstrate how incredibly articulate women with severe disabilities don't need us professionals when talking about their own views of the increasingly punitive benefits system. Don't miss these videos. They tell us more about how to rethink our, too often top down, values than years of social work tuition. These people - not clients, users or patients - are looking for support and we should all join as followers.