I moved to my rainy park parking in my car my house was just too noisy and I got a phone call and so I thought well this is good timing and I should just leave I don't know how long I'll be able to last because my feet are already getting cold i think i was about to talk about this man that I met at the day yesterday and how he owns to recovery houses or to group homes he called it and I guess they're also run by the Health Authority but he works in partnership with them and he's the owner and I thought wow that's cool and he was saying how they're trying to make them less and less medicalized and more and more free so he just struck me as someone who gets it and I could imagine if I was in a place to open some kind of respite he would be a cool person to consult with because he's had some experience with providing space for people so I thought that was really cool and so I got his information and I also connected with the woman who was doing the keynote speech pretty much and it was about the recovery declaration of Canada and and so I asked her because on this new declaration that they were getting people to sign inviting people to commit to the recovery philosophy as opposed to medicalized philosophy getting people who work in the system to commit to this and the number one thing that people commit to or the first thing was learn from people with lived experience by acknowledging and valuing their experiential knowledge and engage them in all aspects of service planning delivery research and evaluation and I think that is definitely the most important thing to be on there and there's only four points on the recovery declaration but that was the first one and so I asked her I said at a break i said i love that that's there that's amazing that's definitely I completely agree but where are the examples or where are the documents and procedures and protocols and structures and systems in place for that to happen it's one thing to say that but their systems in place for four colleagues meeting up and talking about people their system in place for note taking their systems in place for medication prescribing where is the system in place to have this learn from people with live experience and their experiential knowledge and and involve them in and engage them in service planned delivery research and evaluation where are the steps for that where are the protocols where are the procedures because that's not just have one committee once a year one day get some feedback and then go about once daily business of delivering services it's actually that is such a loaded statement that would say like have peer support workers on teams and actually value them and they're experienced by paying them for their input and have their perspective all the time so I think for me right now at this point who knows how it will unfold because I talk to myself about these things from my perspective but I also understand I don't know everything that's happening out there and so that's why I wanted to ask her and she she said that they're going to be creating a guide for people who lived experience so they know what recovery philosophy is and what they have a right to ask for etc and maybe a little bit of a guide and a compass of being able to say well that's not recovery language what you're speaking to me about or whatever so she said that's in the pipeline and that's helpful to me and they did involve a lot of people with lived experience in the creating of this guide and a lot of the things that they're doing so that's part of that first statement but I think that is a huge statement and and from what I know right now it sounds like a token statement it sounds like well that's yes that's nice and since we wrote it there we can say that that's what we're doing but unless there's some kind of real process in place for receiving that feedback and that feed forward and and service delivery and planning and and it is happening in small ways and large way
