Official Charity Statement from the Board and Director

On behalf of the charity’s board of trustees and myself we welcome your patience, continued trust and resolve to keep you and your family safe, healthy and productive through these unprecedented and challenging times.  

We are incredibly proud and grateful to all the YPWD team for going that extra mile in reshaping our services of support on offer and making efforts to personalise them to your individual needs. Also for maintaining personal contact with you as you continue to use the charity.  The team have adapted services in record time. Though it has been a steep learning curve for our staff and service users alike, it is heartening to see how the new remote, digital and virtual ways of working have been well accepted through a positive user experience. The staff adopted these new ways of working from home to help enhance their knowledge and the skills needed for the benefit of our users and their carers and families.

As the Covid guidance from the government continues to evolve, the charity responded appropriately, changing the historical face to face offer to a remote form adhering to the social distancing and safety guidance from Public Health England. This meant a significant service change in providing support using a completely different way for you and your loved ones.

This narrative is to provide assurance and transparency regarding our charity’s forward planning in the medium term and over the coming months.  The team is testing the aspects of wider access and retaining quality using new live video workshops.  We shall endeavour to provide live video 1:1s, regular calls to carers, activity boxes and activity box top ups as well as increase our pre-recorded activity videos. Our team would love to hear your views, questions and feedback all through the regular working week, so please don’t hesitate to call (0118 207 2880), email (contact@ypwd.info), or contact us through social media since it is always lovely to hear from you. 

We are in contact with the Public Health England’s (PHE) national teams to seek appropriate advice on a range of issues including phased resumption of our activities, options for re-starting workshops, PPE cover, type of groups and many other associated matters.  We anticipate that the new normal will necessarily look different from the ‘Normal’, since the charity needs to take into account new social distancing guidance, think about how to make groups Covid-safe and also we are mindful of the financial predictions for the charity sector. We are also capturing all your wonderful feedback and learning during the lockdown period so as to build on the positives, avoid the negatives and continue to offer the same high quality support and services that the YPWD team has always provided. 

Here are a few anticipated changes as part of a phased return. There is likely to be a specific focus on outdoor workshops to allow social distancing with numbers being kept to an absolute minimum to reduce risk. This will likely mean 1:1s and groups of two people and two staff participating initially. As the lockdown eases further, we anticipate that some of our more established workshops will return with smaller numbers of attendees to maintain social distancing and a safe environment. Our commitment will continue to be to provide our activities for those with young onset dementia. As numbers will be more limited, we anticipate less capacity for carers to attend alongside but our staff will be there to support, and we would encourage you to take advantage of the respite opportunity.

The decisions that we are having to make are informed by the evolving advice and guidance from the government and PHE, including a thorough risk assessment of staff and patients to make sure that those we support, our staff and the general public are not put at risk.

We have learned an incredible amount across the past three months particularly in adapting technology to help us to do our work. We may continue with the more successful uses of this technology and intersperse them with future workshops.

Thank you so much for continuing to use our YPWD services. We take this opportunity to assure you that we shall continue to be here for you and your loved ones.