Our news and views
A day in the life...
2 February 2010
... of Kerry Hall, coordinator of our Remote Expert Support Service (RESS)
My working day begins at 8.45am.
I run the Lumos Online & Telephone Support Service, providing direct support to our staff in the field who are closing down institutions, and working on other projects. As well as providing advice on the phone and online, I’m also responsible for providing our staff and pool of consultants with relevant resource materials, training materials and other documents they need. We hope, one day, to be able to offer this online and telephone support service to other organisations working on deinstitutionalisation programmes.
Today, most of my time has been spent organizing two study visits to the UK for our colleagues from the Czech Republic. Twelve people are coming on each visit. Some are from the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (MOLSA). Others are social councillors and directors from local county social service departments. All are involved in the ongoing deinstitutionalisation process in the Czech Republic – the closure of large institutions for children and adults with special needs. They’ll be accompanied by the Lumos representative in the Czech Republic, Petra Kaèírková.
The purpose of the visit is to introduce the range of community services and systems of care for children and adults with disabilities that we have in the UK. Oxfordshire and Nottinghamshire Children & Family Services and Adult Services are kindly hosting this visit. I’m also arranging a number of visits to council and health services for children and adults with disabilities. Visits like these are essential, because it gives people an opportunity to experience a different approach to caring for children with disabilities, an approach that is not based, and does not rely on, institutional care. I hope that it will inspire them, and provide them with a vision of what is possible.
As well as organising the logistics of the visit, I also spent some of my morning working on a toolkit I’ve been developing for the deinstitutionalisation process. I’m currently writing some examples of preparation programmes for children who are leaving institutions and moving into family-based care. This morning, I completed drafting a progamme for children with special needs who are moving into foster care.
Before leaving work, I spoke with Lynda Baxter on the phone. She’s one of our expert consultants who will be traveling to Moldova later this month. She’ll be supporting the evaluation process of children in three institutions that Lumos is helping to close as part of the reform process.
I finish my day at 12.45pm when I collect my daughter from nursery.
