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Tag: Skills for Health

Introducing Liberty Protection Safeguards

As of 1st April 2022, new Liberty Protection Safeguards (LPS) will be in force.

Many people in the UK who lack the mental capacity to consent to care experience deprivation of liberty. This enables care for those with dementia, autism, learning disabilities, etc.

Significant court cases were a major factor in changing the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) to the Liberty Protection Safeguards (LPS). The supreme court ruled that many people were deprived of their liberty unlawfully. Among its rulings, the court provided an official definition of deprivation of liberty:

"continuous supervision and control ... not free to leave"

Read more about these court cases and the judgement of the supreme court in our Introducing LPS resource.

A huge number of changes will take place this April. For example, the safeguards will apply to people aged 16+ rather than 18+, and there will be a whole new role: Approved Mental Capacity Professionals (AMCPs). You can read more about the differences between DoLS and LPS, and find out what the AMCP role involves in our Introducing LPS resource.

 

Perhaps the most significant change is the streamlined, three-part assessment process.

  1. Capacity Assessment
    Is the individual capable of consenting to care arrangements?
  2. Medical Assessment
    Does the individual have a mental disorder?
  3. Necessary and Proportionate Assessment
    Are the arrangements necessary to prevent harm to the individual?
    Are the arrangements proportionate to the likelihood and seriousness of the risk of harm to the person?

 

If you're looking to provide LPS training, consider:

  • Which members of staff will take on which responsibilities?
  • Should depth of training be based on role and duties?
  • Should all staff receive the same training?
  • How will LPS affect the day-to-day activities of the organisation?
  • How will staff prepare for the transition to LPS?
  • What training do new AMCPs require?

At Advantage Accreditation, we can help you with:

 

Experience

We are an accreditation body with a wealth of experience in health and social care.

 

Educational Resources

Our Mental Capacity training course has been updated to include LPS regulations and guidelines.

 

Quality Assurance

If you already have a Mental Capacity training course, we will assess the quality of your learning materials. This includes checking the validity of information, its impact on learners, and how it is presented.

 

Accreditation

Our seal of approval allows you to become a credible, recognised training provider. You can download certificate featuring our logo and keep a record of training through our online portal.

 

Train the Trainer

With our train the trainer courses, your staff can become licensed trainers for specific subjects.

 

 

Find out more about LPS

Resource

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Person-centred approach – training and development

Person-centred care should be at the heart of any health and social care provider’s approach to care. But how do we embed it into training and development? The person-centred approach framework released by Skills for Health, Skills for Care and Health Education England includes a section advising organisations on how to embed these approaches using training and development. The framework recommends a number of “underpinning principles” to guide an organisation’s approach to training and development on the topic.

Behaviour change

The most important of those principles is “behaviour change”. As with the whole idea of a person-centred approach, this concept is now fairly old, but its implications have still not been felt by a vast number of organisations in the sector, and indeed across all sectors. Unfortunately, the framework is frustratingly light on how behaviour can be changed in a positive way, reflecting only that it is more successful than “isolated training”. It does note, however, that any training geared towards changing behaviour will fail if the organisation’s structure and processes reward an old, habitual behaviours rather than reward the behaviours enshrined in the framework:

Development of capability must simultaneously be supported with the right processes, system and opportunity together with locally relevant incentives, which build those intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.

Behaviour change in training - Advantage Accreditation

Co-producing training

The framework also recommends that training is co-produced to a certain extent. This boils down to having the carer or even the service user contributing stories and reflections about their experiences during the course, or even during the planning of the course.

This shouldn’t be new to any good provider or trainer. A good trainer will seek to engage the people on the course, getting them to talk about how they can relate to content of the course and whether they can think back to any relevant experiences. A classic reflection exercise is ‘What would you have done differently?’, getting the learner to retrospectively apply their new learnings to a previous experience.

Again, the framework highlights that the best co-produced training will have people involved in the planning stage without them even knowing it, with HR processes that continuously seek feedback from service users and staff.

Reflective practice

Again, we are all familiar with the importance of getting members of the team to reflect on what is working, what isn’t working, and on the needs of others.

The challenge for many health and social care providers, of course, will be finding the time for members of staff (including managers) to engage in reflective practice. As resources become more stretched, it will become more and more difficult. One possible solution is to stress its importance during the induction period, to effectively train staff to continuously reflect ‘on the job’.

Continuous improvement

The framework focuses on the structural element of continuous improvement – of managers consistently providing feedback to staff. The framework does not mention, though, the significance of a continuous improvement culture. The best companies in industry that practice continuous improvement have it as part of their culture, running through everything they do, encompassing HR, finance, production and service delivery processes.

Achieving culture change, of course, is difficult to accomplish and can take a long period of time. It requires concentrated effort and the full support of senior leadership. As any continuous improvement organisation will tell you though – and this includes the likes of General Electric and Mitsubishi – it is well worth it.

Value-based approaches

This part of the framework primarily refers to recruitment and retention. Unfortunately, the section of the framework seems a little too aspirational. The news this week has been full of reports about the huge number of vacancies with the NHS, with retention proving as much of an issue as recruitment. This is compounded by applications from the EU dropping off significantly in anticipation of Brexit and the end of free movement. Even a brief perusal of any job site will tell you that care settings are also continuously recruiting in a sector renowned for its high staff turnover.

Increasingly, health and social care providers are taking what they can get. Recruiting on the grounds of values and outlook, as the framework advocates, is simply not possible for those who cannot afford to go and do it. The emphasis has to be on training and induction. This is helped by having a strong culture that new workers can be embedded in to quickly.

Methods for delivering training

The ‘narrative’ section of the framework does not elaborate on this principle much, although content further down in the document does by discussing “permitted time for e-learning”. As ever, the key is deciding which approach is most suited for each person and for each subject area. E-learning is often perfect for entry-level staff being trained in compliance topics where answers are often binary (i.e. yes or no, right or wrong). It may not be suitable for training that requires reflection and where judgement may be more subjective.

Conclusion

Although the framework raises some great points, it does feel a little too aspirational and abstract at times. Many health and social care providers will feel that it doesn’t account for challenges in recruitment and funding issues. If you take anything from the framework and this post, let it be these three points:

  • Culture, culture, culture: if behavioural change, continuous improvement and a person-centred approach are going to take hold, it needs to be embedded in your culture.
  • The method of training delivery needs to be suitable for the person and the subject area.
  • Train people to reflect on their work every day and ‘on the job’. This embeds it into their behaviour, and means they are doing it even if you can’t set aside specific time for them to do so.
Person-centred approaches - Advantage Accreditation

Person-centred approaches in healthcare

A new framework is being launched by Skills for Health, Skills for Care and Health Education England to put people-centred approaches at the heart of the health and social care sector.

The framework builds on a long-running trend to put people and their needs at the heart of health and social care, replacing the traditional top-down approach of yesteryear. Although to many this may seem like old news, there are still a number of health and social care settings who do not fully understand the implications of adopting a person-centred approach.

The framework, according to Skills for Health, was created by drawing on the experience and knowledge of professionals in the sector, and is designed to take person-centred principles and apply them to the current landscape. It is designed to help health and social care workers – or rather their managers, in reality – “put person-centred approaches into practice and to create sustained behavioural change”.

You can read the new framework here. As ever, although the thought must be applauded, drafting a framework and implementing that “sustained behavioural change” is the real challenge, and it isn’t clear from the framework how that is to be achieved in a realistic context. Much of the framework – as is clear in the central diagram – is based around conversations with service users. In health and social care settings where human resources are increasingly stretched, finding the time to have these conversations is easier mandated than done.

A more detailed analysis of the section on training and development will be posted shortly.