Westbury church warden and chairman of Westbury and District Link Scheme, John Adams, has been appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the New Year 2011 Honours List in recognition of his services to social care.
John, who lives in the town, has worked in the adult social care field for more than 35 years having been a long serving director of Scope, one of the UK’s largest disability charities. He now runs a national umbrella body for voluntary social care providers and is chairman of the Department of Health’s Third Sector and Social Enterprise Sounding Board.
In the 1980s John developed a range of services, including community housing, for severely disabled people in Salisbury, where he also served as a Justice of the Peace for ten years and was chairman of the Lord Chancellor’s South East Wiltshire Advisory Sub-Committee from 1996 to 2003. He is a past chairman of the Wiltshire Police Authority’s Standards Committee.
John said, “It was a great surprise to receive the letter from the Cabinet Office on behalf of the Prime Minister with news of the award; I feel deeply honoured.
“It’s been a privilege working in adult social care with so many inspirational people. My aim has always been to try and improve the support available to those who can often face enormous health difficulties. But the real heroes and heroines of social care are the army of unpaid carers, many of them school-age children or elderly people, who provide vital support to family members and friends. Without them, the NHS would ‘grind to a halt,’ these are the people who really deserve public recognition.”
