Week 12
- I was reminded this week that we at Compassion in Dying are experts on advance decision forms. This thought was prompted by lots of project meetings with Hippo Digital who are helping us re-build our online advance decision service.
- The last time I had this thought was when me and Jen were working on a content discovery on advance decisions. I can still remember the moment of clarity, thinking “no one else knows as much as we do about advance decisions”. This is absolutely in no way meant as some sort of ego trip or boast — rather it’s just a realisation that people and organisations have their areas of specialty. For us, it’s advance decisions. Helping people refuse any medical treatments that they do not want to be given in the future. It’s our thing.
- It may seem such a simple, dull thought but this week as we were explaining the policy context and messy details of advance decisions to our agency — I couldn’t help but think, we are the experts yes… and yet it is still so bloody difficult to help people. It is a VERY messy policy space. Unlike lasting power of attorney (LPA), the Government has not taken on service provision. This is despite the them being goverened by the same law — the Mental Capacity Act. This means the provision of advance decisions has been left to the private sector, charities like us, solicitors etc…
- Like I said, messy. I’m so conscious of this when working with external people. How do you distill years of policy context, experience and nuance about a topic in a few meetings, so that everyone has the context I think is necessary to design good services? This is not rhetorical — please help!
- Enough of that… I’ll pick this thought up another time.
- I also want to talk about growing pains. I’ve talked before with a colleague about how charities go through growing pains. I feel like we may be in that phase. Moving from a ‘small’ charity to a ‘slightly bigger’ one is exciting as you start to realise the impact you can have, but I think it has implications for staff capacity, mental health, the scope of peoples’ roles, careers… all of it. Not quite sure how to think about this in a constructive way?
- Lastly, just wanted to flag that my colleague Jen has started weeknotes. She is too shy to share them, so here they are!
