Radical Visions Podcast Teaser
Tune in to our new podcast!
The brand new Radical Visions for Social Care podcast launches today!
Our Intro Episode is out now. Listen to this episode to find out more about John & Fran, their experience in health and social care, what Radical Visions is all about and what you can expect from the podcast.
You can tune in on Spotify: podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rvsc, or you can watch a video version over on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xwPqlqBZudw. You can also find out more about the podcast more generally by visiting our Podcast Page: www.radicalvisions.co.uk/podcast. Below we've included the transcript of the episode for anyone who would prefer to read rather than listen. Thank you to Adam Ross and Randolph's Leap for allowing us to use their track 'Let this Lie' as our podcast theme. You can hear the full track here: https://fikarecordings.bandcamp.com/track/let-this-lie.
Get in touch with any thoughts/suggestions on info@radicalvisions.com.
TRANSCRIPT
John: Hello and welcome to the Radical Visions for Social Care podcast.
Fran: this is John
John: And this is Fran
Fran: and together we are Radical Visions.
John: Together we have over 90 years of experience in health and social care settings. I was a local authority social worker for 20 years, in different roles working for Strathclyde and the Borders. I was later the Resettlement Project Manager at Lennox Castle Hospital. From 1998 til 2018 I worked in the voluntary sector. I co-founded Support for Ordinary Living and was Director at Neighbourhood Networks. I sit on the board of various organisations, but previously….. I’ve contributed to the Scottish Review of Learning Disability, and helped establish Values Into Action as an independent Scottish agency.
Fran: And a bit about me, I was originally a psychiatric nurse, working as a ward sister in Stobhill hospital, before leaving the NHS I worked as a clinical nurse specialist in the North Sector where I helped close the institution, Woodilee Hospital, and supported people to move into supported living in their own homes in the community. I then moved on to work for The Richmond Fellowship, and was part of the Person-Centred Planning Consortium with Scottish Human Services, which was away back in 1994. I joined Inclusion Glasgow in 1996 as Deputy Director and became Executive Director in 1999. I’ve got qualifications of Registered Mental Nurse, Registered General Nurse as well as a Masters Degree in Community Care from Glasgow University and John and I completed together a Diploma in Consultancy and Facilitation with the Craighead Institute some years later, which was a really interesting time to spend together.
John: But our paths have crossed on numerous occasions through various bits of joint working and collaboration. We helped constitute, and we were very active in an organisation called ALTRUM which was an alliance of people committed to fostering high quality, person-centred support services. We shared the leadership role together at In Control Scotland for the first 3 years of the organisation's life, from 2006 to 2009, promoting Self-Directed Support across Scotland and influencing the subsequent legislation. We had talked many times about doing more work together, but it wasn't until 2017 that we decided to take the plunge and establish Radical Visions.
Fran: So there goes to the question, what do we do? Radical Visions, we don't really believe that our vision is that radical. We are still working with the same values and vision that we've been working with for many, many years. So what we do is really all about promoting inclusion, it's about deinstitutionalization and making sure that people have their rights as citizens. It's about Self Directed Support, and we work with individuals, families, organisations and the wider society to make sure that we continue to achieve this 'Radical Vision' for individual people and their families.
John: So that means sometimes we’ll work directly with individuals who rely on social care support and who are looking to achieve the best outcomes for themselves or their relatives at a time of conflict. In these situations people can feel marginalised, bewildered, really struggling with what they're up against. At worst, I think, people can experience it as just being directly discriminated against. So we provide advocacy and practical assistance to help folk achieve good outcomes.
Fran: Another strand of the work that we do is working alongside organisations who provide social care. We are able to provide those organisations with training and consultancy services, helping them to think about the support they provide and how to ensure that the organisations work to the values they aspire to.
John: So when it comes to wider society… we’re also involved in a festival: the We Are One Festival, which is a celebration of citizenship; inclusive citizenship and the possibility of a world in which everyone matters, and everyone matters without exception. Radical Visions is a founder member of the Citizen Network and we are the lead organisation for Citizen Network in Scotland. This enables us to get involved at an international level to share Scotland's deinstitutionalisation history and also to tell our unique Self Directed Support story, to share the experiences that we've had and also to learn from other folk.
Fran: As well as inclusion, our work is informed by themes of citizenship, equality, social justice, human rights and deinstitutionalization being at the fore of that. We hope that this podcast will be a way to explore these principles and their implications for social care in Scotland today. We will share our history and experiences of working in and developing social care in Scotland, reflecting some of the lessons that we have been learning along the way, and we will have conversations with people who have shaped this history in big or small ways. We will hear true life stories from people and families and people working alongside them to make change.
John: And we hope that the podcast will be valuable to anyone with an interest in social care. It might be relevant particularly to people with personal or family experience of the social care system, or to people who work in health, social care or social work. We hope that you’ll enjoy the content and we also hope that you’ll get back in touch with us your questions/comments/suggestions etc for future episodes.
Fran: So thanks so much for listening and we’ll be back soon with more!