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In care homes concerns about abuse have established a culture where all information pertaining to a person must be shared, and little attention is paid to privacy in its broader sense. The purpose of this paper is to take a human rights perspective and consider how information governance may impact on the health, well-being and quality of life of residents. It proposes a proactive approach and presents a template for a privacy impact assessment which services could use to improve their approach to privacy, protecting the human rights of those in their care, contributing to their independence and improving outcomes.

A review of historical and current thinking about the value of privacy in human services and wider society leads to a series of challenges to the way in which privacy is upheld in residential care services.

Recent preoccupations with data privacy have led to a myopic neglect of broader considerations of privacy. Whilst it continues to be important to protect the confidentiality of personal data and to ensure that residents are protected from abuse, human services that provide 24 hour care in congregated settings must not neglect broader components of privacy.

Privacy impact assessments have been widely used to check whether data privacy is being upheld. The broader concept that might be termed “Big Privacy” is introduced within which data privacy is but one section. It is suggested that big privacy is severely compromised in residential care settings, thus denying residents their human right to privacy. The extent of such violation of rights should be investigated.

Having set out the potential reach of the human right to privacy, important work needs to be done to find out how privacy might be upheld in the real world of congregate residential care. Some service providers may have solutions to the organisational challenges, have addressed staff training needs and revised risk assessment strategies so that privacy is upheld alongside other rights.

Nearly half a million people live in congregate residential care settings in England, and deprivation of privacy is argued to be a significant deprivation of human rights. Occasional tragedies and scandals in congregate settings create pressure for increasing the level of surveillance, and the right to privacy is sacrificed. This paper offers a challenge to this process, arguing that competing rights need to be balanced and privacy is an essential component of a decent quality of life.

Personal growth and development depends to some extent on choice and control over access to privacy. Recent changes in the law regarding data protection have narrowed our thinking about privacy until it is a small concept, largely concerned with data handling. This paper invites consideration of big privacy, and invites congregate residential care settings to consider how a deep and broad definition of privacy could transform these services.

The authors question the traditional approach to service design, which merely leads to model replication. In order to design a service effectively for a local community this article identifies a need for ‘outside‐in’ service design to truly reflect the needs and environment of a particular community. Using the example of volunteering projects, the authors identify nine key factors that impact on the effective implementation of projects and suggest that consideration of these should form a template for other outside‐in analyses by leaders. The authors pose a series of questions that leaders can apply to their own settings in order to explore the issues raised in this article.

During 2001 the National Development Team has been running the ‘Able Volunteers’ programme. This is a year‐long research programme that has been investigating inclusive volunteering opportunities for people with mental health problems or learning difficulties. Peter Bates, who has been leading the programme, gives a summary of the project's findings and also explores the meaning of another word that is currently fashionable but rarely explained with any precision ‐ the word ‘inclusive’.

This month's round‐up of innovative projects that support social inclusion for people with mental health problems is by Peter Bates

The modernisation of day services presents many challenges. One key challenge is not to abandon the people that these have traditionally supported. Peter Bates from the National Development Team makes a plea for a modernisation process that clearly recognises the needs of this important group.

The concept of ‘social inclusion’ has become shorthand for all kinds of desirable service outcomes, but what does it actually mean? Can it be deconstructed in to component parts and measured? In this article Peter Bates and Julie Repper have made a start at addressing these issues and are looking to carry forward the discussion through the Social Inclusion Research Network, featured in A life in the day 5.1.

Supporting community participation and social inclusion is a key goal of modernised day services but there is a lack of instruments to measure these outcomes. This paper discusses issues around the measurement of social inclusion, presents a pilot study and introduces the Inclusion Web, a strategy to record changes in social networks and environment while supporting the concept of a shared perspective of social inclusion. Two aspects of social and community participation are quantified and tallied over eight life domains: people (personal relationships) and places (institutions that matter to the individual).

The authors explore the concept of leaders as storytellers and suggest that this approach to leadership is helpful as a way of communicating effectively with people. The authors conclude that story skills are also helpful for people with mental health problems to create their own recovery stories, frontline staff designing their professional development and leaders negotiating organisational change.

Mr. Peter Bates, Deputy Chairman of Plessey Electronic Systems Ltd., (PESL), has been elected President of the Society of British Aerospace Companies for the year 1983–84. He succeeds Sir Austin Pearce, Chairman of British Aerospace plc.