Book of You – COVID-19 and Looking Forward to the Rest of 2020

It has now been nearly 100 days since Book of You (and indeed the rest of the country) withdrew its services from care homes, social groups and group staff/volunteer training due to the COVID-19 pandemic. During these difficult and worrying 3 months, we have had to change the way we work and have done our best to continue supporting the most vulnerable people (offering free accounts for those in care homes and to those who were isolated from loved ones between March and May). The feedback we’ve had has been very good, but we did, at the beginning of June, have to make the decision to return to working as a full business. The time felt right as other businesses are returning to work and we do have to ensure our survival.

Along with many others, we have embraced Zoom as a helpful way to continue working and have found it invaluable both in terms of a training tool (including training volunteers and staff at Opal Services in Cheshire) and also in keeping our Associates and Directors up to date with all we are doing in the background while we aren’t able to get out and about. We have mostly been working from home on Government’s advice which at times has been difficult, but is manageable. Director, Kathy Barham, who has been a Dementia Friends Champion for a number of years, has also now trained to run free Dementia Friends Awareness Sessions on Zoom and these will be advertised on our Facebook and Twitter pages, so if you would like to take part in one of these, please get in touch.

We have had support from funders in order to keep the business afloat and to look of new ways of working. Unfortunately, some of the work we had lined up before lockdown is impossible to do at the moment, due to the nature of the work (running group sessions at day centres, for example) so we have had to postpone these until lockdown is over.

We have had the time to fix some small glitches that have arisen with the web app due to updates, especially with iPads, and are working on a downloadable (native) app to run alongside our web app, which we feel will be very important moving forward as more older people become tech savvy and are more comfortable with downloading apps. More of our clients have iPads and tablets now whereas when we began as a business, most of them used laptops. More news on this over the coming months.

There are also a few other things in the background as we get more news on these, we will share them with you. We look forward to working alongside you all again in the ‘real world’ but in the meantime, we are grateful are in a position to use technology to keep families and friends in touch with each other. If you or your business would be interested in attending one of our Zoom training course, please get in touch on info@bookofyou.co.uk