Quality Assurance Service Leader, Thistle Foundation
I am the Quality Assurance Service Leader for Thistle Foundation, a health and wellbeing voluntary organisation based in Edinburgh providing a wide range of supported living services, lifestyle management courses and training and consultancy in personal outcomes and solution focused working. My career has been primarily based on the management of supported living services to people with a learning disability and in the years prior to my current role this was focused on services to people with a strong reputation for challenging services and posing a risk to others.
I have a long interest in the area of risk and have previously worked as a research assistant on a project examining risk in the context of Adult Support and Protection. My interest has grown in recent years as I have managed services to people deemed to be at high risk of causing harm to others. I have been concerned at the way the processes and language of risk assessment can drive risk averse attitudes and a loss of focus on the outcomes that matter to the individual and those around them. I am also strongly interested in my perception that real risk assessing appears to take place as an ongoing creative negotiation with the formal risk assessment often being a bureaucratic exercise. My research aims to look at the way in which risk assessment is carried out in practice in the voluntary sector and identify methods that allow risk assessment to remain focused on clear positive outcomes that improves rather than limits peopleโs lives.
E-mail: stephen.finlayson@thistle.org.uk