I do, I know, go on about how I have the best job in the World ! and today is no exception!!
I teach all sorts of healthcare workers and I love them all, you have to be a special sort of person to work at the heavy end of substance misuse, they sure as hell don’t do it for the money!
In the twenty three years I have been teaching in this field I have taught thirteen and a half thousand healthcare workers! Sometimes I have to pinch myself !
I teach in lots of drug and alcohol services, hospitals, rehabs,etc. and 128 Uk prisons!! I love the idea that if everyone I have ever taught helps ten people (and they help FAR more than that!) then that is 135,000!
When I first began working in in addiction, it was suggested that each addict affected at least 4 people around him or her, a VERY conservative estimate! But even at that rate that would be 540,000! It is hard to walk away from a job where you can be part of that kind of hopefulness.
When I first began working in in addiction, it was suggested that each addict affected at least 4 people around him or her, a VERY conservative estimate! But even at that rate that would be 540,000! It is hard to walk away from a job where you can be part of that kind of hopefulness.
And this isn’t work that is done in fancy expensive clinics, often this is in a run down building in a run down part of a city, or a very small service in a little town on the coast, a community project or an NHS service hanging on to it’s funding by it’s fingernails.
I am as always in awe of them all.
But this week I have been in to three of my usual prisons, and I never fail to come out uplifted, proud of our prison service and privileged to be one of their partners.
Every time you pick up the papers you hear nothing but bad opinions about our prisons, one thing goes awry or something violent occurs, an officer maybe makes a mistake, and it is plastered all over the front page of the tabloid press. What they NEVER print are the thousands of good things that happen all the time, how lives are turned around and how many people will ultimately benefit from what they have learned.
One young prison officer told me once that he had been feeling really fed up, demoralised and jaded, and he was dealing with prisoner who had been in prison for five years and showed no sign of engaging in any rehabilitation programmes. He didn’t have visits and never wrote home, and the officer was fed up with trying to help him. Then something happened and the prisoner suddenly asked for paper and a pen and he wrote home to his mother. Not such a big deal you might think, but the officer said that in that moment he realised what a difference that would make, the mother would have a smile on her face when she got a letter through the door, and when her husband came home she wouldn’t have been crying, and he therefore wouldn’t get frustrated and angry and take it out of the other kids, who wouldn’t in turn go to school and bully other kids because they were so unhappy. Not only that but the officer said that he realised HE had been fed up, grumbling at his wife and maybe drinking too much, he resolved to buy her some flowers and take her out and show his appreciation for her. And then I felt better! listening to his observations and feeling inspired! So I came back home and maybe felt more gratitude, and maybe wrote a little something about it on my FB page, and so maybe others felt better!
Good news and integrity doesn’t sell papers! But it creates a positive chain event.You don’t hear of all the fund raising they do for all sorts of causes, of the sponsored head shaving or the marathons being run to maybe help an injured colleague or child who needs a transplant. But I get to SEE all of that and I am so lucky.
It was never wise words or clever professors or sanctimonious religious people that have impressed me, it has been very ordinary people just like me, going about their daily lives, often doing a job which is mostly thankless, and often dangerous with professionalism , humanity (and a LOT of humour!) and making a real difference in our world that no one ever gets to hear about, simply because they want to do the best they can.
Lots of those positive chains of events being started by maybe one kind act in the most unlikely places and that butterfly effect is set in motion!
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