Weekly Human Rights News: 30-09-22

On Friday, we said goodbye to our Human Rights Officer, Annie. From weekly workshops to campaigning against the Rights Removal Bill to creating our Easy Read human rights postcards with our community partners, Annie has had an incredible impact on BIHR and all the people we work with. While she’ll be sorely missed at BIHR, we know she’ll continue to do great things in her new role in adult social care. 

In this week’s news, we’re highlighting some of the many things Annie has done in her final week alone, which reflects the great and varied work she and our Human Rights Officers do every day. 

On Thursday, Annie met with staff at Sheffield Health & Social Care NHS Foundation Trust to talk about human rights in practice. This programme has been running since September 2021 with the aim of improving outcomes for the people who access services. 

One participant told us that since the last BIHR workshop they attended, they used their human rights knowledge to successfully challenge a decision to move a person from one hospital to another miles away from home. 

Swansea’s Public Services Board have recently declared their aim to become a Human Rights City in December 2022. On Wednesday, Annie met with staff in Swansea's public services to talk about how embedding human rights in practice. One participant said, “the session opened my eyes to how we can better utilise human rights to inform policy development.” 

Tuesday marked one year since we recruited Charli, Hanna, & Kirsten, our Lived Experience Experts. They’ve worked alongside our Human Rights Officers to co-develop deliver and review our programmes to support staff make human rights respecting decisions in children's inpatient mental health care. 

Annie said, “working with Hanna, Charli and Kirsten has been a pleasure and a privilege…Co-delivering alongside the experts has not only been a valuable and enjoyable learning experience for me as a BIHR trainer, but I can see how staff on the co-delivered workshops often seem more engaged with the content, ask more questions, and reflect more on how human rights relate to their work every day.” 

On Monday, we had our all-team meeting in London. We got together to talk about all the work we’ve been doing with individuals, policymakers, public bodies, and community groups. We reflected on the work and resources we’ve created to campaign against the now-shelved Rights Removal Bill and the importance of making our information as accessible as possible – demonstrated by all the lovely responses to our Easy Read guides Annie worked on with our partners at Pembrokeshire People First.