What a day!

Today I attended the GIRFEC/Signs of Safety (SoS) event I mentioned in my last blog.  Terry Murphy was interesting, down to earth and inspirational.  He talked about the core principles of SOS and different ways to implement the approach, including a systems wide implementation.  Sean Rafferty (Service Manager) talked about how we were implementing SoS; Carol Bathgate (Child Protection Manager) gave a case example of a SoS case conference; Shaun Thomas (from our partner agency, Children 1st) showed examples of the 3 houses – a very powerful tool to get children’s views; and then I said a bit about the evaluation I did last year and this project.

Shaun, Carol and I were very nervous,  and all have stinking colds so we took our minds off the impending presentation by trying to decide which of us was to blame for infecting the others.  Of course, we decided it must have been one of our colleagues that was not present!

Alison (Director of IRISS) was there and I was delighted to introduce her to Terry.  He was really interested in IRISS and said he thought it was a great idea – and very innovative (but IRISS is the Institute for Innovation, after all) for a research organisation to have a practitioner in post.

How did it go?  There were representatives from around 15 authorities I think.  Great sigh of relief, we got lots of positive feedback and people even stayed after lunch for the afternoon session!  What more can I say.