Carr Gomm’s Global Ambassadors attend European Social Network (ESN) Conference

At the European Social Network (ESN) conference in Antwerp, Belgium, Kevin O’Donnell, Glasgow Operations Manager and Asiya Sheikh, Glasgow Service Manager, were invited to give a presentation about the Glasgow Integrated Service. The audience of over 60 people from across the world heard about our great work and were impressed by our innovative approaches to supporting people to live their best lives. There was a real interest in understanding how a short-term service could have an impact on people with such complex needs. Delegates really wanted to know more about the nuts and bolts of the service, and there was a sense that there was a real need for similar types of service in other countries.

It was the first time Asiya had attended a conference, and she said it was an experience she would never forget.

Read Kevin’s reflections on the experience below.

“At the heart of Carr Gomm is the principle of Person Centredness – it is the key to achieving good outcomes and enjoying a good life it remains as important to individuals as it always has.

Core to person-centred practice is the view that we are all unique individuals with different strengths, weaknesses, hopes and dreams but what struck me at the ESN international conference, attended by 600+ practitioners from 34 countries, with climates as diverse as Iceland and Qatar, was that almost everyone you spoke to, heard from, or gave a presentation spoke about the same issues and challenges.

Firstly, people are complex.
Everyone attending thought they were supporting the most complex people in the most complex circumstances. Secondly, around the world, finances are tight, and the support needs of people and the number of people with support needs are growing. And finally, the potential workforce is shrinking; in some countries due to demographic changes, but also because the work isn’t valued the way it should be, and neither are the people doing this complex work.

Everyone feels their challenge is unique, and it is. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to all the problems in the global setting.

But the reasons for hope are also many – the people working in Social Care are undervalued – precisely because they are brilliant, capable people who are committed to making society better one support at a time.

AI and Digital solutions – while presenting their own challenges also offer much in terms of improving services, at the conference we saw robots supporting people to eat, and we saw AI systems that could alert services to patterns of domestic violence and reduce the deaths of women across whole countries.

The size of the challenges and the financial constraints on the system means that Social Care is a focus for governments and societies in a way that it never has been before. The importance of support is clear to us, now it is becoming clearer to many more people.

Working in a co-productive way with people we support and our partners across Health and Social Work is required because of the scale of the challenges we all face but it is also the way we should be working for the best solutions and supports.

The reasons for hope are as many as the reasons for despair, its really about deciding what we believe about people. For me, the biggest cause for hope is that good people with the right values are using their agency – their ability to try and make things better – to improve services, the lives of people who need support and people in difficult situations across the globe. We won’t always get things right, but as long as we keep trying and learning, we’ll get there in the end”.