Cymorth Cymru

• Extra Care Conference
• 10 June 2010
• Media Resource Centre, Llandrindod Wells

On June 10th Linc Cymru and Cymorth Cymru held Wales' first ever extraCare Housing conference in Mid Wales. The event sold out, with 100 attendees present to discuss issues such as different mod-els of extraCare, how it has developed differently across Wales, what its future holds, how it can ac-commodate a variety of service user needs and how health, social services and housing can work to-gether through this model.

The conference also saw a thriving exhibition, with Gwalia Care and Support, Tynetec Ltd, Frank Haslam Milan, RNIB Cymru, Johnson Tiles, Tunstall Healthcare Ltd, Ocean Blue Software Ltd and Chubb Community Care all promoting the services that they can offer to commissioners and providers of extraCare.

The day started with Hugh Irwin of Linc Cymru talking about their experiences with extraCare and where he saw the future moving – discussing some key issues that we all commissioners and provid-ers will face along the way. Following this, Director of Housing at the Welsh Assembly Government Ceri Breeze offered his thoughts on how joint working could thrive through this particular model of pro-vision. Following Ceri, we were delighted to welcome Thereisa Baumker and Lisa Callaghan, both re-search officers from Kent University. Lisa outlined the findings from a project she worked on which looked at social wellbeing in extraCare, whilst Thereisa outlined the findings from a piece of research looking at financial benefits of investing in this model of provision – both incredibly interesting and thought-provoking pieces of research.

The penultimate plenary saw two tenants of Linc Cymru schemes talking about how their life had changed when they moved into extraCare. Our closing plenary before the final thoughts were put for-ward in a panel discussion came from Ian Thomas of the Alzheimer's Society who asked, Is extraCare magic? The session was energetic, challenging and thought provoking for anyone with an interest in meeting the needs of those with elderly mental illness.

Four repeated workshops offered delegates the chance to discuss how extraCare could cater for a multitude of needs, the opportunity to share their thoughts on contentious issues and how they could be addressed, a forum to discuss how health services should contribute to provision, and also a chance to share different experiences of operational and design models – all workshops were a credit to those that happily agreed to facilitate the discussions.

The outcome of the day? There is a lot to think about! Linc and Cymorth will be putting together a re-port for all attendees, as well as key individuals from the statutory sector. We hope all those that at-tended found the day useful, the feedback was particularly positive and we intend to build on the day over the coming few months.