Really fantastic day at The Q-Team open day today!! Thanks to everyone that came and really got involved. The Q-Team did a great job of presenting to the group with some of us presenting for the first time (you know who you are). Brilliant job to everyone!!! We are very pleased almost everyone that attended wants to join the team and we look forward to working with you and starting training. Thanks to Kitty and Kittie for doing such a great job in coordinating the day!!

A vibrant Q-Team meeting today. Lots to discuss! The Q-Team continue to be really busy. We have an open day for prospective new team members tomorrow with all Q-Team members presenting and running workshops; our 28th Q-Team visit on 7th November; 19th November attending the Oska Bright film festival; 21st November our 29th Q-Team visit; 25th November The Q-Kit training in Lewes; 26th November "It's not on" Hate Crime Conference at Hove Town Hall; 28th November LD Today at Kensington Olympia!! Phew!!! Fortunately we make sure we are always well fed!

Really powerful weather in our area today. The team are due to visit a service today but we have had to cancel it. I hope we can rearrange our visit soon. The Q-Team hopes that everyone is safe and well.

The Q-Team are really upset and angry about the abuse at Veilstone Care Home
http://ow.ly/qatmv  The team are still affected by what they had seen happen at Winterbourne and are stunned and shocked that this sort of thing continues to happen. The Q-Team are more determined than ever to try to speak to as many people who use services as possible in an attempt to provide an environment in which people can talk candidly about their lives and how they are being supported in their own homes.

Here are some photos of Andrew presenting to people at the British Institute of Learning Disabilities conference on Friday. We presented with Stay Up Late and asked people to talk about what a great life for people with learning disabilities looks like and what are the current blocks to achieving this. Stay Up Late are writing their manifesto based on the blocks that people have identified. The manifesto is not finished yet but you will be able to find it on their website soon.

http://stayuplate.org/

Hi my name is Stephen Clark, and I joined The Q-Team in January 2013. I wanted to join the team as I wanted to help people and use my experiences to help others improve their lives. I have had some times in my life where things were hard for me but having come out of the other side and in joining The Q-Team I have been able to improve things for me and I hope for others too. Outside of The Q-Team I love to do magic (sometimes at The Q-Team) and I provide volunteer magic shows at nursing homes. I have also performed at parties and social events. I am hoping to meet that special person to share my life with at some point but in the meantime I have plenty to keep me busy.

The Q-Team created The Quality Checking Network as a place where people who are committed to involving people with learning disabilities in assessing their support services can discuss ideas and share information.
If you think that people with learning disabilities should be at the centre of the support they receive, feel free to join the network by following the above link or by emailing a.grindley@southdownhousing.org for an invitation.

The Q-Team had a great time having lunch on Tuesday. It was a lovely sunny day and we were able to sit outside.

Final preparations today before heading off to the BILD conference in Birmingham where Andrew and I will be co-presenting and facilitating in the "making sure its a great life" zone http://www.bild.org.uk/our-services/events/bild-conference2013/great-life/ we hope to see some of you there. Stop by and say hi!

Andrew from the Q-Team will be co-presenting at the BILD conference this week talking with others about how to make sure its a great life http://www.bild.org.uk/our-services/events/bild-conference2013/great-life/

The team have also chosen to go out for a meal this week to mark the two year anniversary of  The Q-Team.

We have had a great response to our offer of joining The Q-Team with 10 people wanting to become a quality checker. The next thing to do is meet the people and tell them a little about what we do and answer any questions they may have. We are therefore running a Q-Team open day later this month so we can have a talk about what makes a good life and what we can do to help people achieve it!

The Q-Team received some really nice feedback from the manager of one of the services that we visited recently and as we are ones to sing our own praises we thought that we would share it with you :)
"As a manager I enjoyed the whole Q-Team  experience. They worked around when was the best times to meet service users and how best to interact. They brought things into their reports that I had not thought about and from a different perspective. I was then able to action these points by talking to key-workers and asking for 1-1 chats, or for tenants meetings discussions. It showed me and the team that we needed to address areas of discussions in different ways.

I would highly recommend the Q team. It showed me that having peers audit the service opened up discussions that had not happened before. It created an equal and open environment with much laughter. I have seen service users try to answer what they think support workers want to hear but with The Q-Team they just chatted and spoke about their lives and how they want things.
Nice polite individuals that made service users feel relaxed and happy to talk about their homes and support.
As a manager I would say to others don’t be defensive about items brought up, its real people seeing the service how they see it and, as we are service user focused, then that is what it is about."

The point of encouraging and involving service users in checking the quality of their support services is not to make life easy for support staff. It is to ensure that the people that live in that service, who have that support, are having the life that they want! Having a complete and fulfilling life is not easy for any of us. The Q-Team want to ensure that no-one is making it even harder for people that can already find it a struggle to access the things they love, would love, to do!

The Q-Team are very pleased with the video reports that we have sent to people living at the services we have visited and we wanted to share them. So we have created this mock report to show people how we are continually trying to ensure that service users are meaningfully included in all parts of our quality checks.

In The Q-Team meeting this week we discussed the comments made by staff at a service, that we otherwise considered to be a good service, when they helped one of their service users to answer a question about food. We asked the service user if they get to choose their meals and what they eat? They said they did not get to choose. Staff  helped to explain their answer by saying that they were on a diet and so were supported to eat healthily. The Q-Team were a bit confused with the answer and wondered why eating healthily should be linked to not having any choice about what you eat??

We want to help people to ensure that service users are meaningfully involved  in assessing the quality of their services http://eepurl.com/Gj-WL. Contact us https://twitter.com/The_Q_Kit or at https://www.facebook.com/TheQKit or at the BILD Conference in Birmingham or at the LD Today conference in London for more information.

Busy day yesterday for The Q-Team!! Part of the team visited a service specifically aimed at supporting people with Autistic Spectrum Condition in East Sussex. Another part of the team met with service users from Worthing, in West Sussex, as part of a focus group to talk about the way staff speak to them and how they feel about it. The Q-Team are meeting today to talk about their findings and to write a report for the East Sussex visit. More focus groups this evening and tomorrow evening in Horsham and Seaford. Some great stuff coming out of the focus groups and we want to thank everyone that has attended!!!