Chief Minister Asked To Meet People With Care Experience

Jersey Cares has asked the Chief Minister to meet people with experience of care to hear if the investments have led to changed lives.

It's after Senator John Le Fondre's statement coinciding with a BBC 4 documentary about the island's abuse scandal in which he highlighted what the government has done since.

The advocacy service says the programme may have triggered anger and pain in those with first hand experience.

Among the Jersey Care Inquiry recommendations was for leaders to have regular meetings with people who know what being in care is like.

"It humanises a system. It makes it glaringly important to improve care, to make lives better for the people sat in front of you, and people with lived experience often have insights to how things can be better than you get out without those people." - Carly Glover, Jersey Cares CEO.

The Care Inquiry recommends that the Chief Minister meets people with experience of care regularly.@John_Le_Fondre Are you willing to do so please to hear if these investments have led to changed lives?@GovJersey You have committed to not using the term 'historic abuse'. pic.twitter.com/FDSt1DdEUh

— Jersey Cares (@cares_jersey) March 15, 2021

Jersey Cares has also outlined other support services on offer to anyone who found the Storyville episode to be a trigger for trauma, pain and anger.

pic.twitter.com/w6uVqKQ5fL

— Jersey Cares (@cares_jersey) March 15, 2021

Ms Glover hopes the programme will raise awareness about how important it is to listen to people with care experience.

"In terms of what we hope from the awareness-raising, it's that people would see care not as a system to be fixed - but as children to be loved, childhoods to be enabled, and of lives to be treasured and valued.

"The way that is done is through listening to people with lived experience, allowing those people parity of esteem with professionals and politicians to determine the vision we're working to, how we're going to get there, and how we're going to be held to account against it.

"The way that listening needs to be done has to be sensitive, and mindful and what we hear time and time again is it has to be done in a way which is committed into action to then changing something based on what is heard because otherwise, you're asking people to share what is often their most traumatic parts of their life without any promise of what will happen with that information."