Call for focus group participants: the records of adopted and care-experienced people -

– additional retention guidance for
record-keepers and care professionals

Could you help update retention guidance for record-keepers and care professionals by joining a focus group in November?

Care-experienced and adopted people, archivists & records managers and social workers are invited to participate in an online focus group to shape updated and detailed improvements in retaining care-experienced and adopted people’s records in England and Wales. This has been identified as a critical need by many recent reports including IICSA.

We recently published Guidance on the Records of Adopted and Care-Experienced People (Feb 2024) which sets out best practice, to improve consistency across England and Wales. We are a participative and inclusionary project led by members of the Chief Archivists in Local Government Group (CALGG), independent consultants and academics and professionals working in the records management, data protection and access to records fields, in the charitable and local government sectors. Some of our project members are adopted or care-experienced people.

Focus groups will take place on

Weds 13 Nov 11am-12.30

Mon 18 Nov 2-3.30pm

Thurs 28 Nov 2-3.30pm.

We will meet on Zoom: you will be able to join in your web browser, no zoom account or desktop app/licence is required.

Further information

The Guidance is aimed at people responsible for creating, managing, and providing access to care and adoption records. It includes the viewpoints of care-experienced people and adopted people to give practitioners a greater understanding of their experiences, needs and the challenges they face. The Guidance highlights that all organisations should have an up-to-date policy covering all records relating to children, young people and their families, together with procedures and plans to implement the policy including up-to-date retention schedules. Retention schedules recommend how long to keep different types of records. Each record type should have a retention period based on best practice, legislation, business need or a combination of these. Schedules also include how and when the retention period is triggered, and what should happen at the end of the period: typically either confidential destruction, or being kept permanently.

A retention period of [at] least 125 years from date of birth for case files and preferably 150 years as exemplary practice is recommended in the Guidance. However it also recommends the permanent preservation of these records with an option for people to opt out in the case of their own records.

These recommendations are made because many care-experienced or adopted people reconstruct their personal histories by turning to the records created about them by social workers and care providers. Thousands of requests to view records for this purpose are made each year in England and Wales. The records – a “paper self” - have significant impacts on a care-experienced person throughout their life. However, accessing records is often difficult, both practically and emotionally, and can be traumatic and dehumanizing. Records have been kept inconsistently across the public, private, and voluntary care sectors, affecting outcomes for individuals. Across England and Wales the records of adopted and care-experienced people who are formally classified as ‘looked-after people’ should be kept for 100 and 75 years respectively, but there are no permanent preservation protections for records in law. Moreover, some care-experienced people are omitted from the requirement for records to be retained. In addition, there are now many records sitting in digital systems which do not have a proper data migration/preservation strategy.

My Source: To view the list archives go to: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=RECORDS-MANAGEMENT-UK 

"Enough (long since ...) already!" - #FairPayForNursing

 

 INDIVIDUAL

|

 INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

|

GROUP

	'enough' "as much as is necessary; in the amount or to the degree needed: as much as or more than is wanted:"
	enough is ENOUGH

enough is enough

"something you say when you want something to stop:

Enough is enough - I don't want to argue with you any more."

 

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/enough

 

Image: c/o RCN - https://twitter.com/theRCN/status/1321438463162540033

 

Hands, feet, heart, mind #MHNursesDay

INDIVIDUAL

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

HUMANISTIC----------------------------------------------- MECHANISTIC

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

GROUP - COMMUNITY - POPULATION

Mind	Hands
Heart	One Pair of Feet by Monica Dickens

#MHNursesDay

Plus:

This powerful poem by Stevie is only a glimpse at the tragedy that all our NHS staff have experienced these past 12 months. Thank you, Stevie, for sharing. #MHNursesDay

Please stick to the rules and remember #HandsFaceSpace.https://t.co/bjkaV6oAh5

— Cornwall Foundation (@CornwallFT) February 21, 2021

 

'One Pair of Feet' - How many marches to Downing Street ...?

My source: Katsoulis, M. Rereading, The Happy Prisoner by Monica Dickens, Saturday Review, The Times, 19 December, 2020, p.20. 

Book cover: Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18161452-one-pair-of-feet

 

What is 12.5% of Nursing's effort?

individual

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group - population

skills, responsibility, accountability, 6Cs, morale, motivation, trust, self-esteem	12.5% ?
	"What happens here?"

And .. all embedded within, surrounded by ... the Spiritual domain...

  Fair Pay For Nursing

Find out more about the Fair Pay for Nursing campaign and how you can get involved

#FairPayForNursing

What it means to me / us.

"Nurses' ability to reflect on their practice is vital to the profession" Is it?

I beg to differ with the title of this editorial, as I wonder how vital reflection really is; and not just to nursing, but to the profession. I wonder from the rather detached perspectives of:

• Wigan Pier - and the parochial view this engenders (#globalhealth - where on Earth do I think I am?);
• As a 'local' nurse practising in Bolton;
• As a mental health nurse practising in the community within the NHS
• As a champion of a pivotal* resource for reflection and critical thinking (where is everyone?);
• and several others ...

Nursing Management

Quinn notes how "Nursing continues to develop to meet the needs of the society in which it operates." Plus: "A core part of revalidation is the ability to reflect on, and learn from, our interactions with others." My reading of Kinchin (and others over the years) suggests that reflection needs to be more a practice and revalidation based. I understand this is not what Quinn is saying in this issue on "Reflection as part of revalidation". Reflection using Hodges' model can be preemptive and anticipatory. We need to get beyond introspection and the retrospective important as this is.

As to where people are, it seems they are elsewhere, maybe reflecting in the sciences domain seeking theories and evidence. Perhaps, current teaching and exposure to models and theories of nursing and healthcare has them reaching for 'pure' models of reflection - Boud, Gibbs et al. when necessary. As we talk about the legacy issue that is integrated care, in Hodges' model here is a tool - a 'freebie', a 'takeaway' yes an Ubercare, that can grow with students, newly qualified nurses and experienced staff as lifelong learners.

Now that is vital to me. When reflection is hard-wired**, a part of a practitioner's cognitive apparatus and their educational toolkit to share with the public explicitly or implicitly as the context and engagement demands.

*Pivotal? Yes, and of course in light of the above, I'd be pleased to explain and even argue the case. The irony here is the current (ongoing!) focus upon recruitment and retention. Hodges' model is 'just' a tool, I recognise this; but could the application of Hodges' model energise, inoculate and so prime students for their course of education and practice placements?

**soft-wired too - humanistic

Quinn, B. Nurses' ability to reflect on their practice is vital to the profession, Nursing Management, April 2019. 26:2, p.5.

Nursing: magnetic Force 5

Back in 2009 I came across a post - Nurse magnets crucial for recruitment and retention about the 14 Forces of Magnetism:

In 1983, the American Academy of Nursing conducted a survey of 163 hospitals to learn why some hospitals attracted and retained well-qualified nurses who were devoted to quality patient care.

The 14 Forces are listed and described by the ANCC. The forces themselves include:

• Force 1 Quality of Nursing Leadership
• Force 2 Organizational Structure
• Force 3 Management Style
• Force 4 Personnel Policies and Programs
• Force 5 Professional Models of Care
• Force 6 Quality of Care
• Force 7 Quality Improvement
• Force 8 Consultation and Resources
• Force 9 Autonomy
• Force 10 Community and the Hospital
• Force 11 Nurses as Teachers
• Force 12 Image of Nursing
• Force 13 Interdisciplinary Relationships
• Force 14 Professional Development

The professional, organizational, and political (policy) emphasis of the 14 forces is obvious and becomes clear when each is weighed in terms of where it sits within the domains of h2cm.

Try it as an exercise. ...

Recruitment is ALL about magnetism.

If you are unsure, ask a magnet about the meaning of retention.

Demographics are already applying pressure upon these forces of magnetism. Not just when referred to explicitly in the USA within organizational media; but globally. Demographics is another magnet - it approaches with increasing force.

From here in the UK (and readers elsewhere) we have to exercise care when models are mentioned. While the theorists and philosopher's of nursing nail their definitions to the mast (h2cm?) there remains a models muddle, not just in the variety of models of care, but in the levels at which they operate. This is not a criticism, it's an observation - consider Force 5:

Force 5: Professional Models of Care
There are models of care that give nurses the responsibility and authority for the provision of direct patient care. Nurses are accountable for their own practice as well as the coordination of care. The models of care (i.e., primary nursing, case management, family-centered, district, and holistic) provide for the continuity of care across the continuum. The models take into consideration patients’ unique needs and provide skilled nurses and adequate resources to accomplish desired outcomes.

In the US in particular 'models of care' (moc) often refer to finance and accountability of costs (the market process), in the UK moc might refer to commissioning. In Force 5 the addition of 'Professional' (as the original author's no doubt recognized) is crucial. If you repeat the above exercise, plotting Force 5 on the Health Care Domains Model then you see how Force 5 works for nursing and remains to this day a great achievement as a yardstick for quality, assurance and retentive power.

In the almost 30 years since the research on the 14 Forces, I do wonder though if there is a need to imbue the following with magnetic properties:

• person-centred care;
• self-care;
• carers and public engagement;
• prevention;
• public (mental) health
• and informatics?

Yes, many of the above can be assumed to lie within the existing Forces 1-14. Health and social care are not static. Nursing has much to contend with from the level of the individual practitioner through to the group within an organization. The 14 Forces of Magnetism are well established in the USA and deservedly so, they clearly deliver.

In the political and economical heat of an economic recession, however; magnets may reach their particular^* Curie point. Then they cease to work.

The constant bangs and knocks of change, the incessant hammering of party politics and the 'market' on the door of "high quality nursing care" can also take its toll on magnetism.

Nursing needs to take care.

Related post on Healthcare IT News:

Top 10 trends for 2011 include IT, new care models

*OK it should be constant, but like our patients these magnets are not all the same - they have varying levels of vulnerability.

To follow some definitions from an olde book.