Health and Social Care - OU Community Online

OU student Nicci Shrimpton has been selected as one of the 8,000 runners who will be carrying the Olympic torch on its nationwide tour ahead of the games in London. She was chosen for her work with disabled children as well as many extra fundraising efforts for a variety of charities.

Action for Children worker Nicci was selected by the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) after being nominated by her manager, Eve Chinnery.

Nicci is looking forward to her Olympic role, which will see her carry the torch along a part of the 70-day Olympic Torchbearer Relay around the UK. Nicci said: "I don't know where I will be carrying it yet, but I have been told I will have it on May 27th somewhere between Swansea and Aberystwyth. It could be anywhere on the route, but I hope it's close to home!"

She added that when she received the confirmation email from LOCOG, she couldn't believe it. “I was gobsmacked but absolutely delighted to be chosen as I thought the chances of actually being picked were so minimal. I couldn't be more pleased.”

The keen runner has raised hundreds of pounds for charity by completing the Cardiff Half Marathon and is set to compete in this year’s London Marathon. Eve Chinnery, Action for Children Service Manager, said: “Nicci thoroughly deserves to take part in this historic sporting event. She is a hardworking and dedicated member of the team at Powys Community Support Service and also dedicates her spare time to the disabled children outside of working hours, as well as studying for an Open University degree and bringing up to two teenage sons.”

Nicci certainly has some exciting times ahead. “2012 is going to be a good year with my Graduation, the London Marathon and of course being a torch bearer which I am very honoured to be doing, and to top it all I was one of the lucky people to get Olympic tickets so will be going to the stadium with my sons to watch the Athletics on 10th August too.”

With such a busy lifestyle the OU’s study path was the best option for Nicci who is currently studying for an Open Degree.

“I am very excited to be attending my graduation ceremony in the Barbican at the end of March! I really enjoyed my studies with the OU, I like the flexibility, the support was excellent and I could fit it in around everything else to suit my schedule. I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone.”

Find out more:

• OpenLearn – Olympics/Paralympics 2012
• Study sports course
• Nicci’s blog
• Support Nicci

The complexities behind the work of child protection social workers will put under the microscope in a three-part OU/BBC documentary.

The BBC TWO three-part documentary, Protecting Our Children, follows social workers from Bristol City Council and highlights the life-changing decisions they make on a daily basis for the city’s children.

The series, which broadcasts on 30 January at 9pm, documents a social worker’s job and the complex decisions they have to make, focusing on social work’s most critical dilemma; when it is right to remove a child and when it is safe for them to be reunited. Social work involves a careful balancing act and often involves social workers putting themselves in vulnerable positions to risk assess a child’s household.

The documentary was filmed over 18 months and is about a number of children who are on the frontline of child protection in Bristol.

Open University Senior Social Work Lecturer Dr Lucy Rai and Social Work Lecturer Dr Barry Cooper worked with the BBC to provide expert input into the development of the documentary.

Dr Lucy Rai said: “Protecting our Children witnesses moments of truly inspiring hope as well as chilling stabs of a very cold reality. It very difficult to motivate change, but it is even harder to sustain it both for social workers and for the parents who are striving, against momentous odds, to ‘do the right thing’ for their children. One of the huge challenges for social workers is deciding what constitutes the ‘right thing’; the eternal debate over whether a child is better off with their birth parents or removed.”

As part of its broadcast partnership with the BBC, The Open University has developed a range of free educational resources on social work which accompany the programme. For further information about child protection, free educational resources on social work and the range of social work courses provided by The Open University, visit OpenLearn.

Find out more:

• Study with the OU – Social work

 

Pictured is social worker Louise. Credit: Sacha Mirzoeff

 

In 2005 in Great Britain 41 per cent of all women aged 16 or over were neither married or co-habiting, says Jill Reynolds, author of The Single Woman.  Jill, a senior lecturer in the OU's Faculty of Health and Social Care (HSC) and member of the Centre for Ageing and Biographical Studies within HSC, is interested in the way women talk about singleness and what that tells us about the society in which we live. Here she writes about her continued research into singleness and what it means to be being single without children in later life...

When I originally researched singleness among women in their middle years I talked both to women who had always been single and to those who were single again following marriage or a long term relationship.

Some had children, many did not and I noticed that these latter had a double set of accounting to do. They often felt required to explain why they were single. They also found it hard to respond to questions on whether they had children, which were sometimes actually followed up with a 'why not?', although more often this unspoken query remained implicit.

This brief video gives some examples of how participants responded in my interviews:

I have interviewed many of these women a second time in 2011, now that they are aged more than 60 years. In further analysing data from other researchers (Arber and Davidson*, Bowling**) who included childless people in their research samples of those aged 65+, I noted that while most participants introduced references to their children and grandchildren into discussions on the quality of their life and what made them happy, it was rare for participants to be asked how they felt if they were without children at this point in their lives.

My follow up interviews highlighted that those without children did not lack for activities that contributed to happiness: nice walks and sunshine were often mentioned; and many felt their quality of life had increased, giving up work had meant a weight lifted from their shoulders, and they described themselves as more confident than when younger. Since my original interviews some 13 years earlier two participants had, like myself, married someone they had been seeing regularly.

While for some there was no regret about not having children, a question on 'what if?' produced a number of responses such as 'who will be there to do for me what I did for my mum?'

In contrast to discomfort felt when younger in comparisons between their life and that of friends with children, many were more comfortable with their own situation and might refer to good relationships with their friends' now adult children. Interestingly, a number of participants mentioned talk by their friends in older age about younger family members as something of a nuisance that could make for tedious conversation: 'I wish we could talk about something other than their grandchildren', or 'it cuts down their self-awareness as if they can only focus on somebody else'.

Something had changed in their balance of accounting so that some participants positioned themselves as companionable, free and active, while positioning their friends with grandchildren as burdened by a sense of duty that required them to prioritise time caring for them and a narrow conversational focus.

Find out more:

• What do we know about being old and childless: an interview with my future self
• What can we do if we're not grannies

 

*85 interviews men over 65 years (UKDA 6011 Arber, S. and Davidson, K., Older Men: their Social Worlds and Healthy Lifestyles, 1999-2002 of whom 15 had no children
** 80 interviews men and women over 65 years (UKDA 5237, Bowling, A. Adding Quality to Quantity: Quality of Life in Older Age, 2000-2002) of whom 14 had no children

Commenting in an article on BBC sport London Olympics 2012: Pakistan's school of future stars, Ben Oakely, Senior lecturer in sports studies says a passionate skilled coach with high expectations inspires athletes. He also point out that once someone succeeds at a top level in a sport and a role model is created there is a route to success for others.

Find out more:

• The Olympics on OpenLearn
• Study sports courses with the OU

 

Vic Finkelstein, a ‘giant’ of the disability movement and credited with putting The Open University at the forefront of teaching and thinking about disability has died aged 73.

Born in South Africa his experience of apartheid, including being jailed as a political prisoner, influenced his thinking about how society treats disabled people.

Vic Finkelstein was disabled after a pole-vaulting accident as a teenager, later travelling to Britain for treatment and winning a swimming medal for South Africa at the Stoke Mandeville Games.

Back in South Africa and while at university he became involved with the anti-apartheid movement in 1964 supporting Bram Fischer, Nelson Mandela’s trial lawyer who had gone underground.

In 1966 Finkelstein was sentenced to 18 months hard labour, reduced to three months being ‘a cripple’.
 
In 1968 he fled to Britain and helped found with Paul Hunt the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) which argued that oppression by society was the biggest issue for disabled people.

UPIAS focussed on changing what it called ‘the disabling society’.

Through UPIAS and in the 1970s the television programme Link, Finkelstein helped change the way society thought about disability. In 1981 he campaigned for the exclusion of the South African team taking part in the Stoke Mandeville games for disabled people.
 
He also helped set up the British Council of Organisations of Disabled People and the London Disability Arts Forum leading to the National Disability Arts Collection and Archive.

He was an NHS psychologist before joining The Open University in the 1980s as course chair of The Handicapped Person in the Community the world’s first course in disability studies.

He retired from the OU in 1996 becoming a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Leeds University.

Joanna Bornat, Emeritus Professor of Oral History OU Faculty of Health and Social Care remembered his OU valedictory lecture.

“I don’t think many people at the OU now will know that we had a giant of the disability rights movement in our midst.

She said with other disabled people Vic developed the idea that disability might be the creation of the society in which disabled people lived rather than impairment. That led to a movement that brought changes all of us benefit from now including access into buildings and transport and disabled voices in media and arts changing society for the better.

“Many if not most disabled people would argue there is much left to be done, but without Vic’s theorising and his steadfast non-compromising position, those changes might never have happened,” she said.

Joanna said Vic spoke about being a prisoner in South Africa. In jail he was given a bed instead of a mat on the floor and had ‘helpers’ to get him round the prison.

“His conclusion was that when necessary the state could make things accessible.

“He was given a five year banning order but said that made no difference to him as he was unable to do any of the things he was banned from doing,” she said.
 
Another OU colleague, Jan Walmsley, Visiting Professor in the History of Learning Disabilities told the Disability Law Service website that Finkelstein had an enormously powerful influence on the way the OU taught and continues to teach in health and social care.

She said he put the OU at the forefront of teaching and thinking about disability.

“As a colleague he was enormously generous to me, encouraging me in every conceivable way to develop my ideas, writing and research,” she said.

Vic Finkelstein died at Stoke Mandeville on November 30. A funeral service was held last week.
 

• OU Faculty of Health and Social Care

 

 

open2.net, formerly the online home of joint Open University and BBC programming, is now closed. 

The good news is that more than ten years of open2.net content has been moved to a new website at open.edu/openlearn, creating one home for all the Open University's free online learning for the public. 

The new site continues to support OU-BBC broadcasts, but also gives access to iTunes U podcasts, YouTube videos, free study units taken from OU modules and topical content, arranged under subject areas relating to the OU curriculum. 

There's lots to do - you can watch Evan Davis exploring the state of British manufacturing; explore the frozen planet; get to know the science and history of the Olympics or have a look at our study units in LearningSpace.

Any existing links that direct people to open2.net content will automatically send people to the relevant pages on the new site.

You’ll find more information at open.edu/openlearn.