CEO Chat #5

Full marks for a fabulous week…

Some weeks are full of meetings, which at the time don’t seem to be very connected then suddenly, the dots join up and you are working in collaboration with other organisations and planning activities that enable you to share resources.

On Wednesday I was at a Skills for Care Managers meeting in Penrith. It’s a great opportunity to meet with care professionals from across the county and keep in touch with sector developments. In Cumbria we don’t have a specialist residential care provider for D/deaf clients (yet – I can dream!) but, by working together we help improve the services available. One of the domiciliary care providers, Eden Country Care, recently completed a deaf awareness course with CDA. Their manager, Colette, was delighted with the enthusiasm and results her care team achieved.

Thursday and Friday were ‘back to school’ days for me, with training on financial management and safeguarding. Ordinarily you might think they would be quite dull but no, thanks to engaging and knowledgeable tutors I really enjoyed the sessions and was sent away with homework to do.

All of us can benefit from learning new things or revising topics we first studied years ago, which leads me on to discussions we are having with N R Training (https://www.nrtraining.co.uk/) who are based at Penrith but offer training countywide. If you want fun and learning, they are definitely the people to see – they also have an office dog and nice biscuits! We’ll soon share some of our ideas and programmes we are working on.