We're delighted to welcome Karen Reid, Chief Executive at the Care Inspectorate; and Elaine Torrance, President of Social Work Scotland onto the Iriss Board.

Karen is one of Scotland’s foremost leaders in public sector scrutiny. She has extensive experience in devising and leading scrutiny and improvement interventions across the fields of social work, social care, health, education, and community justice. She led the development of new multi-agency scrutiny models for children’s services in Scotland, and played a key role in setting up Iriss back in 2008. 

“Social work is a practice-based profession and an academic discipline that promotes social change and development, social cohesion, and the empowerment and liberation of people.” It incorporates principles of social justice, human rights, collective responsibility and respect for diversity." (International definition of social work)

This free workshop will explore the topics of eligibility criteria and critical need. It is a follow up to our first Iriss SEEDS workshop held in November.

The workshop will be interactive and provide reflection time and a safe space to explore key challenges from your contexts. It will also surface what we know about strengths, successes, existing good practice and build on 'what works'.

Robert White, Head of Social Work from Independent Living Fund Scotland, will co-facilitate the day. 

We would like to express our sincere thanks to Jim Elder-Woodward, OBE who has now completed his term of office on the Iriss Board.

Jim has had life-long experience of disability, not only as a health and social service user, but as a service provider, planner and researcher. He is Chair of the Scottish Government’s Independent Living in Scotland Project and Co-Chair of its Independent Living Partnership Board. 

His contribution has been invaluable and we wish him all the very best in the future. 

You are invited to provide a workshop contribution to a national conference to share and promote best practice in service user and carer involvement in professional education.

The conference will be held on 26 April 2017 at the University of Stirling and bring together service users and carers, students, educators, professionals and policy-makers. It will be relevant to social work, health, education and other areas of professional education, at qualifying and post-qualifying levels.

Workshops should:

The Scottish Social Services Awards are now open for nominations and we encourage you to enter!

Including 10 new categories such as ‘silo buster’, ‘the untold story’ and ‘head above the parapet’, the awards have been designed to recognise innovation and excellent practice across the sector.

The Office of the Chief Social Work Adviser at Scottish Government is seeking contributions from the social services workforce to a survey on how they access information and knowledge online.

The plan is to understand:

To mark Co-Production Week, guest blogger Emma Barrett Palmer gives her take on co-production.

In the aftermath of first Brexit and now Trump, 'co-production' is not at the top of the To Do list for some of the most influential world leaders. 

So why do we know that it is still the right thing to do? Why is there still a growing movement of people dedicated to the collaboration cause?

Big P politics aside, I want to start by focusing on the small p politics.

It’s Co-production Week (14-20 November)  in Scotland!

At Iriss we believe in active citizenship and involving people who access care and support in a meaningful way - a way that means people have the right to participate in and access information relating to the decision-making processes that affect their lives and well-being. These values underpin effective co-production and are reflected in a lot of our work. 

Examples of our work include: