Mental Capacity Act

As you all know, the Mental Capacity Act will be a hot topic for 2007. There will be training programmes available relating to this, but as of yet these have not been finalised. In the meantime you can read the explanatory notes on the act here and check the frequently asked questions (faq's) here and finally you can read a summary from the Department of Health here

Holidays are Coming (and Going)

Just a quick note this week to wish everyone a Happy Christmas and New Year. We hope that you will all have a peaceful and prosperous 2007.

Please keep feeding back to us any thoughts or queries you have about the courses, the website and about DCT in general.

Hope that we will see as many of you as possible at the Conference in April - in the meantime enjoy what is left of 2006 - see you all next year

Action Planning Day

Last Friday, December the 8th, we met at Sandy Park to discuss 2007 and to develop an action plan for DCT in the coming year. We tied this all in with the original framework business plan for DCT.

It was a very productive day, with several new initiatives coming to the fore. Amongst these are:

* A South Hams focus for the year. South Hams is the area with the lowest take up rate of membership and we need to explore the reasons why.

* Using the Devon in Touch bus to promote DCT's work and to highlight the benefits of membership at various Care events throughout the ounty across the year.

* Working with the new Care Ambassador programme in Devon. Dee West has recently been appointed to the post of Care Ambassador co-ordinator and will take up her post on January 2nd. In the meantime any enquiries about this programme can be made through dctc@devon.gov.uk

I am also endeavouring to keep the upcoming care events uo to date. This is a bit of a Pandoras box as different organisations publicise their events and not others, so if there are missing events on our web pages please let us know so we can include them on our pages.

Finally, please take the time to look at the training courses that are on offer for next year - and if there are any courses in particular that you are looking for, please do not hesitat in letting us know and we will investigate the possibility of putting the courses on.

More from us later

E

2007 Conference

Well its coming to the end of the year, and looking forward to the New Year we will have our conference coming up on 27th April 2007. We have decided that this will take place at Sandy Park, the new Exeter Chiefs rugby stadium. This is a great new venue and has easy access to the M5. Although previous conferences were well received and enjoyed in the grounds of Buckfast Abbey, it was just a question of size really. They were unfortunately limited in the number of people that could attend, and as our last conference equalled that we felt the need for a larger venue was imperative

This year the theme of the conference will be Health and Wellbeing. The focus of this will primarily be the Care Staff but will also have plenty of use and information for others too. So far we have had plenty of suggestions for Workshop topics. Amongst others there will be a workshop giving an overview of Complementary and Alternative therapies that are available across the whole spectrum of Health and Wellbeing (for more information about what CAM is you can look here). As more are finalised I will keep you all up to date.

My apologies for the infrequency of postings here, as we are now an expanding organisation I hope to have more time to keep you all informed.

In the meantime, have a very nice Christmas and New Year and a successful New Year to you all

Kind regards

Eoghan and the DCT Team