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Human Rights and Social Care

A conversation about social care connections

At Outside the Box we want to encourage people to have conversations about how human rights and social care link together.

We’ve shared blogs and talked about it at meetings about social care, but wanted to draw into the conversation people who have different experiences and people who are not part of the organisations or networks that focus on social care.

So we got together with a few people to talk about social care and human rights. Here is another blog describing how we did it – it was a useful type of conversation that will work for other topics too.

What we talked about

The people taking part had different knowledge and experience about how the care system works, but we all cared about this. The points that ran through our conversation were

  • People’s human rights matter and social care should keep all of these rights in mind
  • The policies are in place around human rights and social care, and in theory a lot of good  things can happen, but we are not  always seeing the links between the policy and what happens in practice for people.
  • There are aspects of how social care is delivered in practice , and  the impacts for people looking for support and their families, that most people would not accept in our own lives.

We talked about good creative examples of social care and support that support people’s rights and enhance their lives.  We want more ways of sharing and learning from that – both the ideas and how people can make it happen.

Thinking about barriers and social change

We talked about barriers to people having a good life and getting access to the care services and community supports that can help them achieve that.  They included how services are organised and practical aspects, and in people’s  attitudes such as low expectations about what people can and want to do.

We’re going to continue our conversations and hope you can join us by having conversations with people in your communities and networks.  If you want to know more about the conversations, please get in touch.