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It is the foundations’ philosophy not to promote ourselves as ‘the experts’, but to provide spaces for us to share experiences, knowledge, and bring people together to learn and develop.

The VdTMoCA Foundation has been running a Forensic SIG for many years, it is one of our most successful events, an opportunity to learn about current practices, and refresh theory to enhance service provision.  We also invite ‘Friends of the Foundation’ to join us who have advanced their practice in their field using the model.

The aim is to run SIGs annually, and if there is interest from our members we will run them for different clinical areas, so please get in touch if you think this would be beneficial to you and your clinical area.

Special Interest Groups are online, free to paying members, or accessible with a purchased ticket.

NEW for 2023!

The VdTMoCA Foundation would like to offer its paying members online group supervision sessions.  These will be quarterly and based on need and interest.  

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Group Supervisions will be online, and free to paying members ONLY, you will need to book a place once dates are released.

Dates coming very soon!

The Foundation would like to offer support to OTs in leadership and management positions and share our experiences of embedding the model and its theory into practice.  

We would welcome the opportunity to collaborate with services helping to widen the use of the model across the UK and encourage more services to generate evidence and collect outcome measures.  

Please contact a Foundation Team Member or use the General Enquiries email address to ask us a question.

Occasionally the Foundation Team will offer training sessions on a specific aspect of the model.  Due to the limited availability of the Foundation Team, these can only be facilitated on an infrequent basis.  However, we will also promote training offered by other organisations, our main aim being to strengthen the network and share resources.

Specific training sessions will be accessible with a purchased ticket.

Possible sessions could include:  activity ideas for unfamiliar assessments;  a focus on 'Task Concept', exploring one level in detail

Please get in touch if you're interested in training sessions.

New for 2023!

Have you done something you’d like to share?  It could be anything!  A great group format, a new report, assessment activity ideas.  If so, we’d love to help you share your achievements.  We will also call on the friends of the foundation to share their projects and current research.

The aim is to run sharing events annually but will be dependent on members being able to submit work.

Subscribe and join our mailing list to receive emails from us when we confirm dates.

Sharing events will be accessible with a purchased ticket.  Contributors will have free access.

At this time, the VdTMoCA Foundation UK does not offer a comprehensive training in the application of the model.  It is advisable to have training before using it with clients, and if you would like to use the standardised Activity Participation Outcome Measure (APOM) to measure client progress, then you must have training in this.  Training in VdTMoCA and the APOM is offered by a few different training companies, see below for details.

Many of the training courses in the UK are provided by the International Creative Ability Network (ICAN) 

Dr Wendy Sherwood, DipCOT, MSc, PhD is a co-author of the VdTMoCA. Wendy has 33 years experience as an Occupational Therapist and 14 years as a senior lecturer in OT. Wendy has provided VdTMoCA training and CPD events since 2007, and also provides support and consultancy. In response for requests for easily accessible training, the majority of CPD events are online including Zoom-based supervision. Freely downloadable resources are also available on the ICAN website where you can find more information https://www.ican-uk.com

Contact wendy@ican-uk.com

The APOM is an outcome measure specifically designed for occupational therapists in mental health settings and is based on the Vona du Toit Model of Creative Ability (VdTMoCA).  OTs working with the VdTMoCA in neuro rehabilitation or other physical health fields might also find the outcome measure helpful but it has not yet been validated for those groups.

The APOM covers eight domains of activity participation (see graph). Each of these domains consists of several items to be assessed.  The Occupational Therapist rates their service user on each of these items using an 18 point scale.  The scale is based on the levels of Creative Ability as described by Vona du Toit. Once completed the APOM creates a spidergraph which can be used as an outcome measure, and in turn can support treatment planning and goal setting. 

All OTs are welcome to attend training even if they do not work in mental health, as research outside of this field would be of great value and support the development of the model.

APOM training is available online, and costs £100 per person.

Eligibility for training: Occupational Therapists need to have at least one year of experience in using the VdTMoCA.  

Please contact Daleen Casteleijn at daleencasteleijn61@gmail.com for more information.