www.scie.org.uk

Scie (pronounced “sky”) is the Social Care
Institute for Excellence, but it has less lofty aspirations (to
date at least) for its website, writes Graham Hopkins. Its aim is
to provide basic information as it gears up for business. And basic
information is what it does. Basically. As updating goes, Scie is
the limit. Chairperson Jane Campbell’s speech at the National
Social Services Conference at Harrogate last October must have been
good as five months later it is still the lead item on the home
page. Despite the site’s parking-concession-badge colour scheme –
blue and orange (also, intriguingly, Blue/orange is the title of a
play set in a psychiatric ward) – this Scie is cloudy and grey.

www.doh.gov.uk/ncsc/  

With its website still regulated by the
Department of Health, the National Care Standards Commission still
awaits to register its own identity, writes Graham Hopkins. Perhaps
once it, Frankenstein-like, becomes “live” (as the tiresome
bureaucratic language would have it), it will enforce required and
recommended changes. As the commission is young (unlike its board
to judge from the photograph) it has time on its side. This should
be worth an inspection over the coming year. So, see you later,
regulator.

www.topss.org.uk  

The Training Organisation for Personal Social
Services must be cursing its Website Address, given its Obsession
with using Capital Letters for Everything, writes Graham Hopkins.
Talk about capital punishment. We even had “Social Care Workforce”
but, perhaps tellingly, “service users”. And 2-4-6-8, what can’t
Topss abbreviate? We have NTO, NVQ, PQ and NOS. I was sending out
an SOS PDQ, I can tell you. Sadly, this website is not so much the
tops, more the MIDSS (Many Improvements Dependent on Securing
Success).