Five Bullet Friday (31 August 2018)

Kainde managed to get us a slot presenting at the Joint Management Team meeting of the Health and Social Care Partnership last Thursday which had very positive outcomes. The follow on was an invite to a meeting today at Forth Valley Royal Hospital chaired by Ross Cheap at the NHS who has responsibility for the development of the dementia strategy. That group has been tasked by the JMT to pull together all the different strands of dementia work happening in Forth Valley. We had the opportunity to contribute to the group’s knowledge of OCN, the landscape in general and how different dementia of work might connect up. It also gave NHS staff a reminder of the project its aims and we can work off the back of that to connect with more participants. We will also be looking to use the influence of the JMT to assist with the rollout of the project throughout Forth Valley in phase 3. Thank you Kainde for organising this important strategic meeting.

We are planning an interesting environment and digital training event on Thursday 27th September. Please pop the date in your diaries. It is mainly for staff and volunteers. The afternoon session will be looking at how to use the Place Standard Tool. This is the tool we will use with People Living with Dementia and their unpaid carers (PLWD) to look at their environment. We are also trying to get SCVO to deliver a digital champions workshop in the morning. This training will be really helpful when it comes to volunteers supporting the digital and environment workshops. There is another interesting element to this. The sessions won’t just be about receiving training. We will have Donna Patterson from Alzheimer’s Scotland attending who will be on hand to offer feedback on how to make adjustments to the info and training for PLWD. We also plan to invite other interested parties for the lunch so there will hopefully be additional cross referencing and networking opportunities. The venue will be Codebase the digital hub in Stirling.

We have been matching volunteers with PLWD this week to carry out surveys. We still have some people to match up and book appointments with. We now have an online version of the survey. We have asked some volunteers to test it out. Once we have run the test and got some feedback we will ask volunteers to input the data collected on paper surveys into the on line survey. It will then populate a spreadsheet with all the data we collect allowing us to analyse it. We will let volunteers know when they can do this. We still want volunteers to collect their thought and observations in the diaries as this information will provide material for us to identify themes and discussion topics when we pull together the research analysis days in the New Year. Thank you to Alastair for setting up the on line survey.

Our report to the Life Changes Trust is coming together and we are collecting case studies and all the information together from strand leads. Everything is looking good for our deadline submission date of the end of September.

Volunteer Community Researcher Angelica and I met with the Adult Social Care Service staff on Wednesday last week. As a result we will be sending them our referral form, promotional leaflets and Lorraine Fields Team Leader for Stirling Urban will be re-joining the partnership meetings after settling in to her new role earlier this year. Several staff were particularly interested in connecting OCN with participants and we will be able to follow this up with Lorraine. Thank you Angelica for coming along and doing a fantastic job helping to explain the project and its aims.