At my workplace, our teams get together once a fortnight for a joint reflective practice session. This week we discussed data. More specifically, we discussed scores on a psychometric scale gathered six monthly about all of the young people using our service. We wanted to know what this data told us about our work with children, families and foster carers.

At the end of the previous joint reflective practice session, in which we had discussed some very interesting clinical matter or other, we had announced that data would be the topic for next time. The announcement produced a collective groan, and cries of ‘It’s so dry!’, ‘It doesn’t really convey the complexity of mental health and our work!’, and ‘It’s just for other people to see, I want to talk about the kids and families!’.

Despite this opposition to the idea we went ahead with our data review. So this week I presented an overview of the information we had for each child, and posed some questions for our teams to chew over:

What interests you about this information?

If it as any value at all, what might that be?

How might it be improved?

My questions did not seem to inspire and certainly there were still no pulses racing amongst my colleagues. Then I said ‘Anyone can fall in love with an accountant, even though he wears a grey suit, he’s still a person.’ ‘You’re pushing your luck there’, came a response which indeed I was but the teams duly got stuck in to their considerations of my questions, and then an interesting thing started to happen.

‘The data shows how faltering and idiosyncratic the process of change is.’

‘In order for others to understand why the data is like this we need to be able to better articulate the contexts that our young people are in.’

‘We need to talk with young people much more about their goals and how they and others see them progressing. We need to discuss this data with young people more often.’

And on it went, this process of growing intrigue and enthusiasm, until one of my colleagues voiced what seemed to be the collective experience: ‘I can fall in love with an accountant when I get to know him, personally, intimately, and I can see beyond my prejudices about him.’. And that’s how our passionate, creative teams discovered even a love of data.

When we say that we make use of everything in our grasp to help the children and families that we work with, it turns out that we have to consider absolutely everything available, even when it seems dull at first glance. It strikes me that there is treasure everywhere when we really look with an appreciative eye.

Jael 2021