Service Announcement for 2021
On July 19th England is moving to Step 4. At this time Mind in Mid Herts will continue to keep current safety measures in place. It is really important to us to keep the people we work with safe (and feeling safe to visit our centres) many of whom we know many have underlying health concerns. We will constantly be revising our risk assessments and will inform you when we decide to change current services. We want to ensure that we remain open and are able to continue to offer services. We are remaining vigilant to ensure that the Mind in Mid Herts team stay well and are able to continue to support the people who need us.
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We wanted to write to everyone to let you know our plans for early in the New Year around support in some of our centres. As you all know, Coronavirus prevented us from running support groups in our centres for a large part of this year. This was a very difficult decision to make; we wanted to ensure we kept as many people as safe as possible and did not contribute to the unnecessary spread of the virus. The news of a vaccine gives us all hope, for the coming months however; we still need to ensure we are doing everything we can to continue to keep all our staff, volunteers and clients of our service safe and well.
The good news is we are currently preparing to reopen a number of our centres to host small socially distanced support groups. We will be prioritising and inviting clients of our service we know to be particularly vulnerable, and/or would benefit the most from this support. We will be using our resources to ensure cleaning takes place more regularly, activity rooms are ventilated between groups and social distancing continues to take place within our centres. Before attending any of our centres, we will provide you with guidelines that we ask you to kindly follow to help keep everyone safe when accessing our services.
Due to government guidelines and room capacities, we are limited to group sizes of approximately six people. We know this will be disappointing to hear for many of you, as not everyone will have the opportunity to attend a group straight away. We want to assure you we are doing what we can in the safest possible way. The hope will be that these groups can gradually increase in frequency so more people can attend at least one support group in the centre each week, if they feel comfortable to do so!
Over the coming weeks we will start making contact with you to find out your interest in these groups and whether you would like to attend. These groups will be by pre-booking with us only. For safety reasons, the centres will still not be open for the public, people who do not have an appointment or are not booked to attend a group will not be able to enter our centre’s/offices. We really appreciate your understanding with this and as we expand the groups on offer, we will continue to make contact with you to determine your interest in attending.
It has been a difficult year for many and we thank you for your patience with us adapting our services to be able to offer support either by the telephone or online in the digital groups. We ask you to continue to make use of these alternative services while we work to get some of our services back into the centres. If you have not tried any of our online support groups yet, we definitely recommend you give them a go! All of the information on what is currently running is below:
Living Well courses and workshops
If you are unsure about any of this information or have any questions, please speak to a member of staff from your nearest centre and they will be more than happy to assist with any query you may have.
We hope to gradually start seeing you all next year, until then, continue to do what you can to keep yourselves safe and well.
Author: Nicholas
Posted on: 18th December 2020
