Harbour Supported Living Services: Upskilling with Care
We sat down (virtually!) with Camellia John, Service Manager at Harbour Supported Living Services to find out what has motivated them to continue to invest in staff development.
Harbour Supported Living Services is a Supported Housing provider based in Wirral. They have provided care and support to individuals with mental health issues for over 20 years and have extended their support provision to include supported living services for older people, people living with learning disabilities, and people dealing with substance misuse issues.
So, how does Harbour Supported Living Services continue to provide a high-quality service to all its service users?
Over the years, Harbour Supported Living Services has had many staff who have progressed on to become social workers, general nurses and psychiatric nurses and the organisation has always prided itself on upskilling and investing in its staff.
According to Camellia (pictured left), there has been a decline in demand for residential care, more and more older people who are eligible for residential care want to be cared for within their own homes and communities. This has put a greater emphasis on having a highly skilled and knowledgeable workforce who can safely deliver care outside of the confines of a residential setting.
For those living with learning disabilities or dealing with substance misuse issues, they require the availability of information, financial resources and a support system.
These are not the only motivating factors: there are also regulatory requirements which need to be met by care organisations, another reason why emphasis has been placed on upskilling staff.
Camellia says, “A lot more skilled procedures are required from our staff. Some treatments which would have previously been provided by district nurses or in a residential setting, we are now able to provide in the home, which is a massive benefit to the individual as its less disruption to their daily lives so staff need to be trained to administer these treatments that enable people to live independently in their own homes for longer.”
For Camellia and the team, the primary motivation for upskilling their staff has always been to enhance existing knowledge to ensure staff can continue to provide a high-quality service to people with varying care and support needs.
Camellia said: “We have worked with The Learning Foundry for a number of years.”
“The assessors have always been really good, really flexible with us and they provide great feedback on how our staff are performing.”
Upskilling their staff has greatly diversified the client group that Harbour Supported Living can work with.
“It leaves us open to more business opportunities if we’ve got suitably skilled staff with a variety of knowledge, we’re able to support a more diverse range of service users than ever before, all because of the extra skill set our staff have as a result of training via the Learning Foundry,” said Camellia.
In the current COVID-19 climate and the challenges that brings to deliver training face-to-face due to social distancing and safety guidance, The Learning Foundry has continued to deliver courses for Harbour Supported Living online. The benefit of this is that we have been able to avoid any disruption to training programmes at a time when the social care industry needs to maximise its resources while keeping all learners safe.
A recent Learning Foundry graduate from Harbour Supported Living commented:
“It has been great! I’ve learned a lot and, even when we went into lockdown due to COVID-19, my course wasn’t disturbed when we made the switch to distance learning. My tutors were always just a Microsoft Teams call away and I always felt like I had their support when I needed it,” said Angela Coggins, Support Worker at Harbour Supported Living Services.
These are some of the challenges that care organisations are facing at this time and we can help to alleviate this by supporting your staff to develop their knowledge through a range of accredited courses delivered by us!
For more information about how we can help you to upskill your care staff, contact us on:
03001238088 or info@thelearningfoundry.co.uk
Or visit: https://www.thelearningfoundry.co.uk/health-and-social-care