Welcome to the latest entry of our Joint Working Journal, which coincides with Carers Week 2024! This is timely for us as today we’ll be reporting on the work of Steering and Advisory Board 1 (SAB1) which covers our Carers Programme, as well as the newer Communities and Older People’s Programme.

SAB1 met on 4th June and members received a reminder of the vision, key themes and outcomes that were included in the co-produced regional strategy for Carers.

One significant area of progress has been the creation of a workstream facilitating closer working with Primary Care services with the aim of co-producing a plan to improve support for unpaid Carers accessing services such as optometry, dentists, pharmacies and GPs.

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Young Carers Take Centre Stage

SAB1 also featured a lively discussion around Young Carers, including a debrief on the Young Carers Action Day event which we touched upon in a previous Journal entry. The session, which took place on 13th March in Swansea’s National Waterfront Museum gave our region’s Young Carers a platform to highlight the challenges they face and make recommendations for how education settings and other services can provide meaningful, practical support.

Some of the Young Carers who attended on the day then went on to record a fantastic ‘Everyday Young Carers’ podcast episode where they discuss their experiences and how services can do more to help Young Carers carry out their caring role.
SAB1 members were treated to a snippet of the podcast, which is available to view in full on YouTube:

The next step for Young Carers is to start co-producing their annual ‘Young Carers Celebration Event’ which is due to be held in the autumn of 2024. We’ll bring you more on how this is taking shape nearer the time!

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Communities and Older People

SAB1 also included an update on the progress of the Communities and Older
People’s Programme, which is still relatively new and making great headway across key areas of work.

Significant progress includes:

• The recruitment of a new Regional Volunteering Strategy Manager (welcome to the team, Dominic!), who has hit the ground running and has already established a new regional Volunteer Managers’ Forum which is due to meet for the first time in a few weeks. The Forum will provide Volunteer Managers with a space to share ideas, good practice and overall peer support.

• The creation of a Falls Prevention workstream which will act as a central point for oversight and reporting for all falls prevention-related groups and services within our region. The first task has been a mapping exercise to capture data on all forms of falls prevention provision across our region. The information gathered will be analysed and any identified gaps will inform the future direction of this workstream.

That’s all for the time being – keep an eye out for the next edition of our Newsletter which includes an update on the progress of our Well-being and Learning Disability Programme, as well as a colourful item on our day out at last month’s Swansea Pride event 🌈

Thanks for reading!