The Productive Pessimist

  This is the main text of an article raising a critical eye at the UK government's recently announced social care reforms - which, themselves, are essential to ensure robust resilience, and an ability to actually implement, the planned reforms to the NHS. Our response here is intentionally brief, and intended to serve as an introduction and invitation to health and social care organisations, and other businesses, in the UK to partner with us to solve the problems they perceive with necessary systemic transformation. The cart before the horse Labour’s burning desire to reform the NHS, reduce waiting lists, and give patients greater autonomy and choice, relies on social care reforms; social care reforms which won’t even begin to be considered - by the groan-inducing “Commission” - until April 2025, with a very slow burn to a potential action plan being available sometime in 2028 - just in time for another General Election, and, very likely - given Labour’s proven ability to alienate...

Along with  co-production , lived experience has become something of a buzzword in recent years, and, as with all 'trends', people are moving from engaged curiousity to wary suspicion. At The Productive Pessimist, we work exclusively from a position of lived experience - but what does that mean, and what, really, is  lived experience? What Working From Lived Experience Means For Us Working from lived experience means everyone on the Productive Pessimist team has been through what they're guiding others towards understanding of.   We didn't just take a 5hr course, watch a couple of YouTube videos, or read a bestselling book. For example, I (Ash) have the following lived experience: . 22yrs lived experience of managing all aspects of rural living, including travelling 30+ miles for work, without a car . 19yrs lived experience with serious pyschiatric conditions . 16yrs lived experience in trans masculine experience and identity . 9yrs lived experience of kinship care, ...

  TW: Discussion of systemic transphobia, Discussion of racism "How can a trans woman be CEO of an endometriosis charity?!"  Well, the head coach of the England Women's Rugby team is a male-identified, cisgender (assigned male at birth) man. The CEO of the RNIB isn't blind. CEOs of anti-poverty charities are certainly well-remunerated enough to not actually be in poverty. Most have never  experienced hardship, having danced from Executive post to Executive post, before eventually landing as a CEO. The upside of being a pessimist is you spend so long looking at problems that you gain an intuitive awareness that, very often, the thing being presented as "the problem" isn't, in fact, the real  issue that needs a solution. In endometriosis , the (very real, for those who suffer from the condition) issues of medical fact would be fairly straightforward to address. The problem  is medical disinterest, and, very particularly, the attitude of the medical profess...