Open Door Policy Part 2 .......

Part two…

So what did all of this mean? On the one hand it meant that our employment support team had to ask the right questions to ensure they were providing good risk reduction but also person centred support to each and every one of the people that worked for us. On the other hand it was like a whole new world to a huge number of people that had always been treated like a category in the past. We didn’t care why you were here, we cared that you wanted to give it a shot. We had people with mental ill health, learning disabilities, homeless people, carers, people that did poorly at school, people with physical health conditions, ex-offenders and single parent families. They were all in it together; no one knew their history on the shop floor because it wasn’t relevant. Supervisors knew enough to support each person well in their job.

The effect of this way of working was profound – people were no longer treated according to their history or label, they were treated as an individual that had something to contribute. Some people worked 5 days a week, some worked 2 hours a week – it really didn’t matter. Most important of all to me was that people made friends with each other and started to support each other, even though they knew nothing about each other’s past. An ex offender was supporting someone with a learning disability and a person with a physical health condition was supporting someone that had been a carer for over 40 years. It really was amazing. Society has so many ideas of what is right and wrong nowadays – we like to say that we are protecting people but are we really? Is it not more the case that we are just scared of being caught doing something wrong? People have asked me how we made sure we did enough risk assessment to ensure we were protecting vulnerable adults – my argument to that is that we were carrying out the most valuable assessment of all, one of making sure a person was treated as an individual. Of course we had to make sure that “vulnerable people” were being protected but in working the way that we were we ensured everyone was being protected as much as they possibly could be. I was not considered a vulnerable person when I went out and was attacked by a man in Glasgow. He took away my childhood and my self esteem and made me into a frightened young person with no regard for their own life. Bad things happen to good people all of the time, we cannot wrap the world in cotton wool. We can absolutely do our best for every individual – and we have a duty to encourage people to use self advocacy and help us to help them.