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Patient and carer

Making personalised patient care an everyday reality

Personalised patient care can make a huge difference to patient experience, allowing them to take control of their own health and well-being.

Why is personalisation important?

Think of a time you had to use some sort of service. Maybe a doctor or a plumber or another type of service and the way you were treated was dismissive and you didn’t feel listened to. Perhaps someone else was treated more favourably. Perhaps you just felt like one of the crowd. Perhaps your views were dismissed. You feel like the service is ‘done’ to you. It doesn’t feel nice at all, does it?

We know that people sometimes need services to support their daily lives. People want to be treated fairly and equally with compassion, respect and understanding. They want to receive services that provide support and care in a way that they feel they are an active partner.

This is exactly what we expect when we receive a service. We bet you can remember that occasion where you haven’t been treated in this way and how that felt. Imagine if that was your daily lived experience. That’s why it’s important!

We are all individuals with individual tastes, opinions and experiences who would want to make different choices and we have a right for it to be like that. This doesn’t change when we need to use health or care services.

Personalization is not just something extra for services to be providing. It is the fundamental way we should be delivering services to everyone.

“When it comes to wellbeing, it’s vital that our services look at people’s needs as a whole, from social care to health and housing. That’s why we want to put power back into the hands of people accessing services, their carers and families – by personalising care and focussing it around individual needs – so we can help people to live happier and more independent lives, ” Caroline Dinenage, Minister for Care.

So what does it mean in reality?

Personalization is about recognizing individuality and putting the person you support at the heart of their care. Asking them for their views and providing a service in keeping with how they want it to be delivered. It’s about using a collaborative approach and enabling those we support to…

  • share what’s important to them
  • think about the things they can do to live well and stay well
  • find out about the support they need for self-management and agreeing actions they can take for themselves
  • understand what good support looks like to them as an individual person
  • consider the care and support they might need from others and how they would like that to be delivered.

It’s the service you’d want for yourself or someone close to you.

Is your practice caring?

One of The Care Quality Commissions (CQC) key questions asks: is your practice caring?

Personalized care and support planning address the holistic needs of an individual, including their care, physical and mental health needs.

Personalisation is about putting the person at the center – it means understanding, responding and learning about the whole person, their health condition, their life story, their abilities, interests, culture, wishes, preferences and needs. It’s about caring enough to find out all these things.

Through developing relationships with people you support and their family and carers enable them to be at the centre of decision-making and an equal partner in their health and care.

It supports values of recognizing and promoting individuality, independence, privacy, partnership, choice, dignity, respect and rights. We absolutely owe it to the people we support to care and treat them in this way.

How should organisations use our courses?

E-learning can help organisations to improve services, experiences and outcomes for individuals.

Benefits for organisations using e-learning have long been discussed. The advantages over face to face training are clear and established, from printed resources to travel costs but the real advantage is team engagement and the fact that personal development resources are available for them wherever they are and whenever they’re ready to receive it.

As presenteeism becomes a real challenge for organisations – then training presenteeism actively disengages learners, by taking them away from their work and priorities they are actively occupied with, and attempts to make a change.

The right learning to make it work

Although there may be obstacles in making personalisation happen, the opportunities and benefits are enormous for those being supported. A fresh approach to developing skills, knowledge and confidence is through providing learning in a way that learners can access it when they need it, where they need it, at the time they need it and on their own device.

E-learning enables better management of time and helps learners to understand what they need to know and how to put it into practice. It can help to ensure consistency in learning and it’s available for the learner to use as a resource even after they have completed any of the courses.

How do our courses support personalized practice?

Our e-learning courses help people to understand the theoretical perspectives of personalisation and apply them in their everyday practice.  The courses are designed to challenge the learner to reflect on their current practice, recognize strengths and areas for development and identify how to make changes. Delivered in a straightforward way, they help the learner how to apply what they have learned into their everyday practice by giving them good practice examples.

How do our courses help people to change their practice?

Adult learners prefer to use knowledge and skills that are personally applicable in their specific role. E-learning supports learners in building their knowledge and using it to develop their own practice. There are interactive explanations, questions and animations to make the courses interesting and enjoyable. Using video clips helps to illustrate important points too.

E-learning provides learners with the ability to spend more time with those needing support. For instance, developing knowledge and skills in personalisation can help you to give individuals the tools to help themselves rather than forcing an approach on them.

Relevant Learning Pool courses available now:

  • Personalisation – Exploring the values and principles underpinning personalisation and the role of the care worker in delivering personalized services. It also looks at the different ways of receiving self-directed support and explains some of the concepts surrounding personalisation in practice
  • Care Certificate – Standard 5: Working in a person-centered way. Learning Pool is a Skills for Care endorsed provider for these courses.
  • Life Story Work – Do you ever find it difficult to connect with someone you are supporting? How can you get to know the real person? In this module, you will learn how life story work can help tell someone’s story.

Coming soon:

  • Person-Centered Approaches – a series of courses which meet the requirements of the Skills for Health, Health Education England and Skills for Care Person Centred Approaches Framework (2017). The courses cover the skills, knowledge and behaviors that everyone delivering services needs to ensure consistent person-centred approaches.

For a preview of these modules or more information check out our Social Care Catalogue page or request your 7 day free trial in the form below.

About the authors

Avril Howarth is our Subject Matter Expert across all of our health and social care content. She holds a Doctorate in quality in education and learning and held a national role for the Department of Health and Department of Children Schools and Families for over 3 years, setting up and leading a National Support Team.

Jill Thorburn is our Subject Matter Expert across all of our social care content. With over 25 years’ experience of adults’ and children’s social work services, Jill has carried out extensive work within social work management including, safeguarding adults, management in every area of children’s services.

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