Here comes the SUN

OK, Clapham Junction wasn't all that bad, and they're trying to improve it by having jazzy lifts to all the platforms, and it WAS quite easy to find the right train to Balham. And Balham itself was quite interesting - a retro-tube station on the corner, with Californian traffic lights. And rows and rows of decent solid victorian houses on the dawm cycle ride to the hospital, where I was met by somebody I have never seen in my life before - but offered a cup of tea and comfy room to watch the SUN come up (forgive the pun).

The meetings went to plan - firstly in a consulting room in a converted nurses home and then in a converted ancient ward from the days when Springfield used to be the County Asylum for South West London.

Now, as one of the purposes of this magical mystery tour of the country is for 'getting the message out there'. So just what is 'the message', and why use a blog as part of it? The problem is a bit of a Catch-22: we won't know just what the message is until we have been round everywhere, and we won't know how best to use the blog until we have talked to everybody about it.

In our minds, the message is something like 'people around the country, in these different innovation centres, which used to be called PD pilots, have done some extraordinary work in completely new ways, involving all levels of the system, and it needs to be taken seriously'. At least that's the message we're starting out with; we are collecting mountains of data to back it up as we go round, and it might end up quite different.

The medium is quite another aspect. The one definite thing is going to be a rigorous report which will analyse, summarise and communicate everything we gather on our travels, and suitable parts of it will be put through various channels that are available to us at the Department of Health. The rest will 'emerge' as the process develops - and it is the softer, more varied and less concrete. Again, we have started off with some 'ground level' ideas - but will modify them as we go. One rather nice one that came up this afternoon is that we will take a photo at each site, and post it on the blog for each entry. What we have already decided to do with Ann, our web supremo for the national PD website, is to offer each site a web page there for 'official information', and to offer each service user group we meet a page for whatever artistic and creative things that they want to put there (like poems, drawings, paintings, photos, videos, sound clips or pdf documents). If the service already has a good website that they are quite happy with (for example, on their NHS Trust's server), then we will just put a link to it from the national site. If they don't already have an 'official' website, or want to use some pages more flexibly than their organisation's policies allow - we will be happy to host it. Or if they want to stay completely quiet about what they are doing - we'll leave them alone (but we hope not many will choose this option). But if people want to use our national PD website in other ways, we will try to help.

Our very helpful focus group at SW London SUN wanted their photo on the blog - though not everybody in the group wanted to be in it - so here it is.

Can we ask that they do us a small favour: could each of you, when you see your picture here, just add a few words to the 'comments' about what the day was like for you? You don't need to identify yourself in any way if you don't want to. Thanks!

Next - off on the Northern Line to the other side of the river... (People who don't know London might not understand the enormous significance of this!)