Humansolutions Bulletin - December 15th 2016

Neil has now produced a short video giving an overview of the programme. Neil will be happy to hear from you if you have any questions. Click here to view the video

Some you win, some you lose is a well-known saying. We can’t realistically expect to succeed in everything we do, so we have to learn to take the rough with the smooth, of course. However, my concern is that life can be so pressurised much of the time that we do not take the opportunity to savour those successes; we perhaps feel we are too busy to stop and focus on what has gone well because we are too busy rushing on to the next challenge or dealing with things that aren’t going so well. This is not just a pity to miss out on the positive feelings associated with success, it’s also a problem in at least two ways…

One in four of us will experience a mental health problem every year - that means that, right now, one of your friends, colleagues or loved ones is going through it. But too many people with mental health problems are made to feel worthless or isolated. The way you act towards someone with a mental illness can change their life: by opening up to mental health you can make a real difference. Click here to read more

In France and Spain support programmes are helping vulnerable young people access employment and secure housing, or continue with education. More than 4.5 million young people in the European Union – approximately 20% – are unemployed, and long-term youth unemployment is at a record high. Patterns of employment are often characterised by temporary, part-time or short-term work, and this is certainly the case for young care leavers – if they are employed at all. At the age of 18, care leavers are more likely than other young people to not be in employment, education or training, to be socially excluded or homeless and make up a disproportionate percentage of the prison population. It is therefore crucial that public social services…

Conflict in the workplace is inevitable, or at least, it should be. Managers should begin to worry as soon as they start noticing their workplace is free from conflict. You might be reading this and thinking, “Why should we invite conflict?” I’ll answer that by saying: you need to know the difference between good conflict and bad conflict. If we take a look at the origin of the word conflict, we might begin to get a clearer picture of why it’s necessary in the workplace. Conflict is derived from the Latin words ‘com’- meaning ‘together’ – and ‘fligere’- meaning ‘to strike’. So conflict essentially means ‘to strike together.’ That means when you’re in a meeting with a colleague and you…

Seth Goodburn seemed fit and well until two weeks before he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died just 33 days after diagnosis, spending much of that short time in hospital. In the emotional whirlwind of coping with the poor prognosis his wife, Lesley, felt their hopes for Seth’s end-of-life care were sidelined by medical professionals trying to do their job. “The NHS focuses on the medicine and trying to fix people even when that’s not possible,” she says. “A lot of the conversations and decisions that we might have made were overshadowed by dealing with what was the next medical treatment and intervention.” There is an ongoing conversation in the medical profession about how to care for terminally ill…