"Why does it happen like this?". Consulting with users and providers prior to an evaluation of services for children with life-limiting conditions and their families

Background: Children with life-limiting conditions and their families have complex needs. Evaluations must consider their views and perspectives to ensure care is relevant, appropriate and acceptable. Aims: We consulted with children, young people, their parents and local professionals to gain a more informed picture of issues affecting them prior to preparing a bid to evaluate services in the area. Design: Multiple methods included focus groups, face-to-face and telephone interviews and participatory activities. Recordings and products from activities were analysed for content to identify areas of relevance and concern. Results: An overarching theme from parents was “Why does it happen like this?” Services did not seem designed to meet their needs. Whilst children and young people expressed ideas related to quality of environment,services and social life, professionals focused on ways of meeting the families’ needs. The theme that linked families’ concerns with those of professionals was ‘assessing individual needs’. Two questions to be addressed by the evaluation are: (1) to what extent are services designed to meet the needs of children and families, and (2) to what extent are children, young people and their families consulted about what they need? Conclusion: Consultations with families and service providers encouraged us to continue their involvement as partners in the evaluatio

ALL RIVERS RUN INTO THE SEA

As the reader will see both the stories and poems which follow draw from everyday experiences , occurrences , and thoughts , They are not designed to fictionalize life as much as to portray it realistically. In doing so the purpose of my writing is to awaken in the reader a sense of the poignancy of everyday experience--not only of others but also of his own . They are an attempt , then, to expand not only my own consciousness but also the personal consciousness of my readers

The emergence of devotion to Jesus in the early church: The grass-roots derivation of the trinity.

Our familiarity as Christians with Christian faith's conviction that Jesus is divine and that God is triune tends to dull our appreciation of how utterly revolutionary and radical that development in the God-consciousness of Jesus' disciples really was. They, like Jesus, were Jewish. Faithful to their tradition, they held an exclusivist monotheistic notion of God and of devotion to God. Yet, their experience of Jesus resulted in a truly amazing change in their God-consciousness and a radical reinterpretation of their faith in the one God, that was eventually to come to expression in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity