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I was privileged to work on a recent project to improve management and access to these social care records.
We created guidance (pdf) for everyone involved in creating and managing these.
Care-experienced and adopted people contributed, as well as people working in records management, archives and information governance.
One of the simplest and most powerful actions we found was this: when providing copies of files to the people they are about and information has to be removed, redact in pale grey or white, not black.
Which of these do you think is the least-worst to read when you're trying to answer painful questions about your own past?
This simple tip shared by an experienced information governance professional had many of us amazed at its simplicity and keen to put it into practice right away. Free! The only effort choosing a different colour in your software!
Baroness Lola Young of Hornsey, herself care-experienced, says in her foreword to the guidance "if the answers to some of those questions, painful as they might be, can be found and dealt with in a healing, sympathetic environment, then maybe some of the hurt can be washed away. And that’s where records come in"
If redaction is necessary, this can be done in a caring way that might reduce the trauma of accessing the records and put a brake on what Lola describes as "the rollercoaster of emotions involved in the search for, and reading of extensive records... my life documented not by me, or for me, but about me."
Just one of numerous practical tips that are part of a kinder approach to records.
Read more in the guidance covering England and Wales (the law is different in Northern Ireland and Scotland).
Information for care-experienced and adopted people, birth parents and relatives about finding records.
