We’ve had a busy few months since the start of 2022, visiting county hall, making contacts with practitioners, charities and volunteers involved in Adult Social Care, and getting the first Communities of Practice (CoPs) set up across the county. (If you haven’t seen our previous news stories about these, you can read more background information here about the CoPs and how they fit with the vision of the Oxfordshire Way.)

So far, we’ve set up three CoPs (loosely based around Oxford City, Abingdon and Banbury) and we expect three more to have their first meetings next month. Through the sessions we aim to: share experiences and information; make contacts and linkages across organisations and initiatives; and share successes and solve problems – all with the ultimate aim of providing better support and solutions for potential and current clients. Another key part of each session is to offer training to participants on topics of interest to the group.

The Oxford City group had its third session this week, and we were delighted to welcome Natalie Davis from Active Oxfordshire to deliver an interactive presentation on helping people to become more physically active following the pandemic. Previous sessions have included: useful discussions on supporting people to gain confidence to restart attending events after being at home for so long during the pandemic; a demonstration of how to get the best out of the Live Well Oxfordshire site; and some thought-provoking inputs around how to bring lived experience into the group in a meaningful way.

Straight after Easter, we are looking forward to the second meetings of the Abingdon and Banbury groups. Each of these had a good mix of participants at their first session, but there is plenty of space for more to join! The first sessions mainly gave an introduction to the initiative and started to build the relationship between the organisations present. However, we also started to engage with topics such as health care provision, awareness of initiatives such as Move Together, and the support that groups such as Good Neighbourhood schemes can offer. The issue of increased cost of living was highlighted, and we will look at training on this and other topics such as dementia for future sessions.

If you work directly with Adult Social Care clients (in either a paid or voluntary role), would like to know more and are interested in joining any of the CoPs, please sign up here.

We hope to see you at a session soon!