Skills for Care Project
We are working with Skills for Care on a project called Skills Around The Person – a person-centred approach to understanding the skills that are needed to support someone to live more independently in their local community.
We are working with a small group of individuals with learning disabilities to start with and we’re looking into a few ideas including;
- Enabling one of our clients, a young man with severe learning disabilities who is really passionate and knowledgeable about gardening, to help another of our clients to do her garden. He is getting a great sense of achievement and renewed self-respect from helping another person with something he enjoys and they have become firm friends through the project.
- We’ve helped another of our clients to choose, buy and learn to use a tablet and, through skills sharing, she has learnt how to use social media on the tablet and can now interact with her friends and followers on social media!
- We are also working with a group to organise a holiday and by sharing the skills of the group they will do it all themselves, choose the destination, when to go, how to get there and what to do when they are there. It’s been great for them to have a real-life project for which they can practise and hone their money skills, meal planning and numerous other skills while making friends and having a holiday to look forward to at the end of it!
These sorts of projects enable us to power health and Social Care forward in the region and we learn a lot from them too. We can’t wait to roll this out across a wider group once the pilot scheme is complete!
Top quality training for our team!
We currently have 3 members of the team working towards becoming Dementia Care Coaches.
We are incredibly fortunate to be awarded 3 places as there are only 420 places across Norfolk and Suffolk. This shows that we’re proactively seeking out training opportunities for our staff and in this case the training will enable us to provide this crucial coaching to the families of those affected by dementia.
Once qualified our three Dementia Care Coaches will be able to help with these significant issues affecting all those touched by this heart-breaking condition:
- How do I communicate with my family member?
- How can I manage the dementia behaviours?
- How will I keep my loved one safe at home?
- What are safe activities to keep him/her involved and active?
- How can I prepare for disease progression?
- How do I find relief and respite from caregiving?
- When and how should I hire in-home caregivers?
- How will I know when, or if, it is time for a move to residential care?
- How do I navigate through the healthcare system?
- What are some ‘red flags’ I should be aware of?