This year’s Link Officers' Annual Meeting was a huge success, and was well attended by Link Officers from across the country.
As you would expect, we take evaluation and feedback very seriously at Research in Practice, so we were delighted by the excellent evaluation response rate, and thought it important to reflect back to Link Officer’s some of the messages from the evaluation forms.
100% of respondents rated the event overall as ‘good’ or ‘very good’ – and the opportunity to network and share practical tips with other Link Officers was highlighted as particularly valuable.
We planned the programme very carefully and tried to achieve a balance of research-based presentations, interactive exercises and opportunities to showcase practice form within the network. It was heartening, therefore to see how positively the speakers were received by Link Officers. In particular, Gwyther Rees’s presentation on child wellbeing generated positive comments (don’t forget to explore The Children’s Society website for more info, as did Tony Munton’s. Some of you will have seen the link Geoff recently posted on the Link officer exchange with a link to the graphs Tony was demonstrating (click here).
Liz Holt’s presentation about the work being done in Cumbria to develop and embed a needs-led approach to assessment was also very popular indeed. Research in Practice has been supporting Torbay to implement a similar approach, if your agency would like additional support to adopt this approach please contact your regional lead to discuss.
The vast majority of attendees were happy to receive all the presentations on a USB stick. In future, the events team will ask at the point of booking whether you would like to receive the presentations by email instead. You can also access all the presentations from LOAM 2010 here.
Many Link Officers were particularly interested in the use of technology throughout LOAM, and several have volunteered to be part of a pilot group to support us as we develop our web-conferencing. It’s not too late to volunteer – just contact
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to take part.
Link Officers broadly found the group session with their Regional Leads useful, and many enjoyed the opportunity to contribute to future planning of Research in Practice. The exercises certainly provided us with useful feedback. The feedback around how we can make Link Officers feel even more valued is being collated and we will publish a short plan for action in the near future.
