Katie Brennan, Registered Branch Manager – Carefound Home Care
- Making sure that our induction process is robust is vital to us because it means we are recruiting the right people for the job.
Hayley Gill, Professional Carer – Carefound Home Care
- So when I first started, we had a full week of training in the office where we covered the Care Certificate. After we’d finished all our training in a workbook we went out shadowing with one of the senior members of staff, where they completed observation forms and where I did my medication competency to make sure I was ok doing it on my own. After that we had a sign-off meeting with the manager.
- Before I met the clients, one of the members of staff would always come and introduce us as well. So, I’d always met the client before I went to see them on my own for the first visit.
Katie Brennan, Registered Branch Manager – Carefound Home Care
- We always want to make sure that staff are striving to do the best that they can do, and I think is important in that. So, we encourage it as best we can because things change, you know, policies change, legislation changes, and everybody has to be safe and know what they are doing.
Lydia Ferguson, Shared Lives Officer, Shared Lives – Lancashire Country Council:
- So, in Shared Lives, we commission lots of different specialist training for the carers, but also the individuals we support as well. An example would be the social media training that we commissioned. That was produced because of lots of different issues popping up with social media and the risks involved with social media and how we can overcome them really. It went down really well with the carers but what we have found since then is that we need something like this for individuals as well; the people that will be accessing social media and how they can protect themselves
Mike Schofield, Registered Service Manager, Shared Lives – Lancashire County Council
- We have good relationships with all our carers and all the people that are supported by our carers. We do this by regular visits to the house, we also do a lot of carer meetings and also, we have a lot of people who attend information meetings at night-time socially.
Mary O’Dolan, Shared Lives Officer, Shared Lives – Lancashire County Council
- I always run monthly meetings with my team. We sit round the table and we think about what we could do better. We come up with good ideas and we think how could we do that better.
- So, just a little example was I had thought it would be a good idea was to run coffee mornings for carers and we started it and more carers started coming. So, I felt that was a little bit of development that we initiated and now it is and that now happens across the county.
Leanne Brotherton, Shared Lives Carer, Shared Lives – Lancashire Country Council:
- Shared Lives offer me a great deal of support. They support me by visiting me on numerous occasions throughout the year, they are always at the end of a phone. If my support worker is not available, they pass on all the information to the next available person.
Sarah Dew, Shared Lives Officer, Shared Lives – Lancashire Country Council:
- We keep people healthy by making sure they attend all their health appointments and we check that at each carer visit. We also refer to other specialists if needed to, such as Learning Disability Teams, psychiatrists, and we keep in touch with our carers all the time to make sure that people are healthy, and looked after, and have good wellbeing too.
Laurie Cook, Shared Lives Support Officer, Lancashire Country Council:
- Keeping people healthy is a major part of what we do and we do that by closely monitoring when we go out every three months on our carers visits, asking questions about people’s general health, but then delving a little deeper into recording all their recent health appointments, that includes Doctor appointments, hospital appointments, chiropodists, dental appointments, when they last had a flu-jab, etc. We also encourage people as much as possible to eat healthily and maintain a healthy lifestyle through diet and exercise.
Sarah Jane Clapson MBA, Head of Outstanding, Regional Director – BUPA UK
- I would recommend for any home that wants to go for Outstanding a number of different things.
- First you have got to live and breathe it. Right from when you are being inducted, right the way through supervision, you are constantly talking about what ideas do you have? How can you make a difference in this home?
- So, it’s about everybody understanding what the standards and the quality of the project is and what would be expected, but how you can get involved in it.
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