We arrived home to utter chaos; I have now learnt never to rely on an adolescent teenager. The house was unliveable in for 3 days so luckily Seppi let us use her holiday cottage.
Although we had bad weather in Australia, particularly in Melbourne I don’t think we were quite prepared with how cold & wet it would be. We have all acclimatised now. I must admit that now the cottage is sorted, the fires have been burning & it’s warm & cosy I am glad to be home for a few weeks.
Charlotte & Laia our 2 pigs have really grown, we now have to decide whether we are going to use them to breed or whether they will keep us in Pork for the next year.
Ron’s eldest daughter Victoria graduated from university in Teesside as a psychiatric nurse a fortnight ago; she has worked really hard and is very passionate about recovery and how people are being treated. I think she will be another strong advocate for humanity based nursing care in the future.
We have just heard we are off to Palestine for 2 weeks in January. I am really looking forward to seeing how they are doing. It was so good having the 2 nurses over with us in Australia, one of them had never left Palestine before. Their enthusiasm & desire to see recovery based practice happening in their own services is wonderful particularly given the circumstances & the lack of resources they have. I now find it difficult when uk based staff moan about lack of finance and use this as an excuse to do nothing, when I have been privileged to see staff do great things with very little.
The chief nurse is a midwife by background & due to john Watkins I found out that the word “therapist” in its original translation means Midwife of the soul, I think this describes so accurately what good nursing practice in psychiatry should be about, helping the person through their crisis and finding themselves in the process- reborn and transformed.
Ron Coleman and Karen Taylor have an international reputation as speakers and authors. They are the directors of ‘Working to Recovery Limited’ an innovative international consultancy, training and publishing company with a cutting edge approach to supporting and improving mental health provision.
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