A Small Smile

The smooth talker....

Rain Rain Go Away.....

Did I miss Summer? I feel like I have just performed a Rip van Winkle! Last week I was basking in the heat of glorious June sun and worrying if I had enough sun cream to last the weekend, and now I am cursing because I left the umbrella in the car! Here is the view from our office this afternoon!

Anyway, to more important things. What we have been doing.

This week we have had an interesting Business Planning meeting, exploring the possible future sources of funding for the Independent sector. There will be many new things that will come out of this, but the first one I can tell you about is that from July 1st all Vulnerable Adults Training will have no charge. This covers all aspects of it, including the POVA Train the Trainer courses. Based on our previous experiences of what happens when courses are free we will be requiring all attendees to send a cheque for £20.00 and if they attend the cheque will be returned. If not then it will be cashed. We feel this is the best way to deal with this.

We are hoping that this move towards free training may be extended to other courses - so all I can say is 'watch this space' we will continue to fight the Independent sectors corner on these issues.

There was also a Team Meeting for us at DCT and the wider Learning & Development team which took up most of Tuesday and we learned more about forthcoming changes to our team structure. As these are nowhere near finalised I will not bore you with the details.

The rest of this week has been taken up with number crunching to see where we stand relative to the whole of Devon, regarding the numbers of staff working in Social Care and any obvious gaps or needs in learning that may exist. I have unearthed some interesting figures and will be posting them on here once I have confirmed their accuracy.

Finally we are still wrapping up feedback from the conference and will post that information as soon as we have it prepared.

In the meantime, adieu and have a bon weekend!

Eoghan

Its Friday!

I've tried this with my essays for University!

The Heat! The Heat!

Crikey - what a week for heat - and it is going to look like getting hotter! I must try and sell the idea of air conditioning to the Buildings Manager - just so we can keep our suave demeanour here at the DCT office......

This week has been a hectic one as I was off for two days to study. Yesterday we were all at the Skills for Care 'Big Event' Conference at Sandy Park. It was an interesting day and it helped me to put faces to names as well. The theme was 'Creating a Learning Culture' which may sound familiar to a few of you, as that was the topic of our 2005 Conference at Buckfast Abbey - Care 4 U!!

I did get to meet up with Trevor Bevins of Skills for Care who we may end up working closer with to help identify the communications issues which appear to be pervasive in the South Hams. More of this in a later Blog.

I also met Jo Zakrzewski of Tracey House in Bovey Tracey, who has been a most enthusiastic supporter of DCT and the Learning Gallery, so I was able to have a chat about the good and bad points of some courses and it was both informative and a learning experience for me.

We also had some new members, which is a great thing as we are deifinitely getting our message across now. There are hopefully a few more possible members from the day too.

Once again Sandy Park produce a great event - the food was too good as usual - no wonder I cannot lose weight!!!

Big news about Adult Protection Training - this will be available for free from now on. As this can be a nightmare when people book on to free courses and don't turn up, we will have to have a deposit system in place which is forfeit if the person doesn't turn up on the day. This will include Train the Trainer POVA training! So watch this space!!!!

We got the statistics for the website for the month of May and they just keep getting better.
We had 562 unique visitors who had over 12,600 hits between them. This is an increase in visitors of 29% over April 2007 and an increase of 8.2% in the number of hits they have had in the same period. Compared to 2006, there has been an increase of 629% in visitors and 874% in hits from May 2007 to May 2006. This is most encouraging as people are patently using the site but the only thing that is lacking is some regular feedback.

The Care Ambassadors have recruited and trained another 7 Ambassadors and they are going from strength to strength - which is such good news as they have accomplished so much in only 6 months. Once again if you want to have a look at information about them you can look here to get details and contact details too.


Today Lucy and myself met with a COPD Nurse Tutor who will be putting on a training day later this year. This will cover bronchitis, acute asthma and emphasima - it looks like it will be a course that is well worth while and will give a respiratory experts insight into the challenging aspects of this debilitating condition.

Well that seems to be it - the weekend is almost upon us, the beers are being chilled, the forecast is sunny and there is a French Maket in Bovey tomorrow where I shall shop for fine cheeses and wickedly nice bread, so have a great weekend one and all and I will update you again next week.

Regards

Eoghan

ps here is a picture that was sent to us of my two lovely girls up by Haytor, taken by two American tourists 6 months ago and kindly emailed to us this week, Medhbh is on the left and Ailbhe on the right (If you have problems with my name I dare you to try theirs!)

This is the limit of my ability too.....

A Week of Many Things....

Well another short week has whizzed by no time at all!

This week we got the feedback from our first Epilepsy Courses. They were exceptionally well received and Madeleine Bexon, the trainer, will be running more of these later in the year. It was great to read how positively these courses have been received and it looks like we have hit on a good course for the future.

We have also had a few ideas about Team Building Courses. Would these be of interest to anyone? Or have they been something that you have all tried before?

I also met with Matthew Byrne of Devon Carers Link. This looks like it will be a useful meeting with the Organisation probably joining us soon. This will bring in a host of new members in the form of the informal voluntary carers from all around the County.

Lucy has been busy with the new courses and the June programme is very full already. If there are any courses that you have missed out on please let us know and we can look at running them again.

Dee West has been up working on the Care Ambassador part of the website and it is looking very good now - so anyone who is interested in this project should contact her directly.

The Learning Gallery is also available (at last) to all of you - you need to log on through the member pages - use your number as your user name and your password is your postcode - all in upper case - use Caps Lock when doing it. If you have any problems let me know.

On a down side - my car was sick this week - it involved lots of sharp intakes of breath from the mechanic and at least one 'Dear oh Dear!' with tutting noises - so after fixing it he happily relieved me of a lot of cash!!!

That coupled with the resounding spanking that Ireland A received at the hands of the NZ Maori meant it was a week of mixed moods - but a very generous person handed the five of us who went 5 free tickets for the grandstand - so that was £200 saved!! Result!

And I got to see this -

Have a great weekend, one and all!