The Care Fit for VIPS toolkit – expanding our range

One of our previous blogs presented the Care Fit for VIPS (CFFV) toolkit, a self-assessment tool for people who work in care homes, day centres or domiciliary care. We’re pleased to say that we’ve recently been able to add two new versions to our offer: one for hospital settings and one for community settings.

The format remains the same, but the indicators and examples used have been adapted to be relevant to each individual setting, and the resources presented to help you get ideas for improving your service have also been tailored depending on setting.

As with the earlier versions, it’s free to register for either or both of the two new ones, all you need is an email address. It’s worth noting though that your email is linked to a version so if you want to register for more than one version you’ll need multiple email addresses – sorry!

So why have we got two new versions? We’ve had a VIPS framework for acute hospitals for a while, so it seemed natural to expand and update it to become part of the CFFV family. Also, our work around Meeting Centres and PhD’s relating to sports and arts have made us think more about the community aspect more generally rather than our more traditional care settings.

For the community version we’ve focused more on ‘support’ than ‘care’ and tried to think about how it could apply to a variety of organisations such as a Meeting Centre, leisure centre or high street shop/bank. The range of possible organisations our there means that not everything will be directly relevant to every organisation, but the underlying principles are still likely to be transferable or at least make you think about your organisation from a different perspective.

Although both new versions are up and running, as with the previous versions they are – and will remain – works in progress. We’ll regularly check the resources to make sure the links still work (if you spot any we’ve missed, please do let us know at dementia@worc.ac.uk), and continue to add new resources as we hear of them. Hopefully this means you’ll always find something useful that’s probably free to use too.

So if any of that sounds interesting, just go to the website, sign up (don’t forget to check for the activation email which might go to your junk folder), and have a go.

Thanks to Crystal for their ongoing support and technical expertise to make it work.

If you have already used a version of the Care Fit for VIPS toolkit and have made changes in your care setting as a result, we would love to hear from you. Please access our short online survey to provide us with some information about what you’ve done.

Thank you!

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