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If you tell me of your experiences of health and/or social care, I will record them (anonymously if you wish) and make sure they are heard in the annual report to the Care Quality Commission.

About Mike

Mike has had a deep interest in service user and carer involvement in social services and healthcare and a parallel interest in advocacy since the 1970s. In the late 1990s, the government started to express ideas about patient and public involvement in health and Mike has followed those developments - from Community Health Councils (he was once shortlisted as a caseworker) through PPI forums (he was an inaugural forum member) and into Local Involvement Networks (LINks). He has made central contributions, not only to Parliamentary Select Committee inquiries but to the PPI literature and was instrumental in pressing the Department of Health into introducing Criminal Records Bureau checks for PPI forum members (see Access All Areas,

Background

Mike was born in Llandudno, north Wales and grew up on a two small council estate streets. From a working class family in the poorest part of town he passed for Grammar School but, although in the A stream throughout, engineered his departure at age 15, rebelling against the gross class distinction and snobbery there. He served a five year apprenticeship with the Wales Gas Board and practised as a Gas Fitter in London, Shropshire, Denbighshire, Guernsey and back to Llandudno until 1968.

He then changed career, getting a job as a student child care worker. Mike has been married three times a he has lived with third and present wife and family here in rural Norfolk since 1980.

Professional history summary

30 years as a mental health social work practitioner and MWO/ASW in Devon, N Wales and, from 1978, East Anglia - hospital based for Norfolk to 1985, community based for Suffolk to 1999 (with 2 year spell 1989 to 1991 as a freelance substance misuse counsellor mainly at the Roche Clinic, Southend and NORCAS in Lowestoft).

Special interest in supporting developments of service user and care involvement throughout.

An inaugural active member of the reinstituted British Association of Social; Workers’ (BASW) Mental Health Special Interest Group and, as social work representative at the Parliamentary launch, the whistleblowers’ organisation Freedom to Care in the early 1990s.

Mike remained active throughout the 1990s and particular national work included: mental incapacity; eating disorders; defeating depression; support for those in difficulty; advice and representation; whistleblowing; and mental health law revision and reform. Shortlisted for the Mental Health Commission in mid 1990s and Parliamentary Officer for BASW in late 1990s.

Early ill-health retirement in 1999 from full-time work with Suffolk (via an Employment Tribunal disability discrimination action).

Active in volunteer work since retirement, including mental health advocacy, whistleblowing advocacy and false allegations (of child abuse) advocacy; social work practice teaching; compiling and writing a small community newspaper (and developing advocacy reporting); researching service user and carer issues and the development of PPI; jazz education projects; and, as a member of the Norfolk UNISON Retired Members Section, union member representation.

In the last twelve months he has been a member of the interim Norfolk LINk, working with their Improved Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) group, their Communications group, their Substance Misuse group and their Annual Healthcheck group for the Norfolk and Waveney Mental Health Trust. He was also approved as a Volunteer Advocate for Age Concern Norfolk in February 2009 but ceased to work with this organisation after coming across some poor advocacy practice.

Published work:

• Free Expression of Staff Concerns (whistleblowing) for BASW, 1993;

• articles on whistleblowing issues for Community Care, Care Weekly and Professional Social Work in early/mid 1990s;

• ‘Whistleblowing and training for accountability’ in ‘Whistleblowing in the Social Services’, ed. Geoff Hunt, Arnold 1998.

• BASW Mental Health Special Interest Group’s response to the Reform of the Mental Health Act White Paper;

• individual contribution to the Joint Committee on Human Rights report ‘Draft Mental Health Bill’ (their appendix No. 10);

• AAFAA report (presented as a witness) to the Nolan Committee inquiry into Child Abuse in the Catholic Church 2001;

• individual contribution to the Home Affairs Select Committee on false allegations of child abuse;

• various articles for the Beccles Community Newspaper, ‘The Essential Voice’;

• ‘Access all Areas’ (PPI), in Care and Health Magazine 13 - 19 April, 2004.

• ‘PPI = Patient and Public Impediment’ - various outlets April 2004.

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