New Types of Worker - Delivering Choice and Independence in Adult Social Care: Training
Delivering Choice and Independence in Adult Social Care
Strand 1 Responding to and preventing depression in older adults
Context/Background
Depression is routinely accepted and not acted upon in older adults attending care services.
Consultations with older people and their carers in the London borough of Barnet showed that older people feel that depression should not be routinely accepted as common in older adults, and they wanted to see that services reflect this.
From this starting point, Adult Social Care Services in Barnet set out to look at the development implications of transformation for a local authority in terms of responding to and preventing depression in older adults
Aims and Objectives
- To design and implement a pilot training programme for social care staff working with older people to learn: facts about depression in older adults, prevention activities, how to seek professional support, etc.
- To use the outcome of the pilot to design a programme for the wider social care staff working with older adults in Barnet.
- Indirectly, to benefit service users' health and quality of life by reducing depression.
The Plan
- The participant organisations were to include day care, residential and domiciliary care agencies.
- To deliver 3 modules of training to 40 people in 4 batches/cohorts.
- A fourth module was to be an evaluation to test the skills and knowledge retained by the participants and to gauge what had been put into practice and whether this had an impact on the service provider's policies.
- The training was to be delivered by members of the community mental health team including previous service users who had suffered from depression.
- The professionals involved were to include community psychiatric nurses, psychiatrists, social workers and psychologists.
What Happened
The training team was formed as planned above.
Staff from the Learning and Development team coordinated the training programme
8 organisations released staff to attend the training including care homes, a day care service for adults from ethnic minorities, voluntary agencies, home care agencies, and the intermediate care team staff.
What was Achieved
All 4 cohorts of the training were successfully delivered and .36 of the total 40 participants attended at least 3 modules
At the end of this programme 76% of the participants demonstrated clear understanding of signs and symptoms of depression, strategies to prevent depression, who to turn to for help and when and how to seek professional help.
What Helped and What Hindered
- The handouts were seen as a useful information tool.
- The mix of professions of the trainers added value
- Using people who had experienced depression to deliver part of the training was appreciated.
- The flexibility of the learning and development staff helped e.g. by delivering the training within participants' work environments.
- Release of staff to undertake the full programme proved to be difficult for some.
- The pace of delivery could have been slower to allow more active participation.
- It would have been helpful to examine the venues in the provider settings beforehand to assess their suitability for delivering training.
What We Found Out
- Participants felt that this training should be offered to all care staff as a part of their induction to the care sector.
- They felt that this programme is more effective than the current practice of shadowing a senior worker or a worker with more experience.
- Future training should allow participants to present their own cases.
- In future a handout on mental health resources should be provided to course participants, including mental health agencies which can be accessed.
- In future, managers from participating organisations should be involved in designing the evaluation module in order to obtain quantitative data, before and after the programme.
Evaluation
- The project was evaluated by using quizzes, small group discussions and participants reporting examples and anecdotal evidence of what had changed in their practice.
- 76.5% were able to retain knowledge and skills from this course and apply it
What New or Changed Skills do People Need to Work in This Way?
The identified new skills required for Social Care staff are:
- Knowledge and skills in identifying symptoms of depression in older adults, ability to analyse whether the symptoms are due to depression or another medical condition
- The confidence to enable concerns to be raised, shared and reported, within their own settings
- Confidence and expertise to liaise with community mental health team staff or general practitioners for support when needed
- To be able to address issues of contention, for instance if the service user or their family member do not agree that they have depression
- Ability to undertake preventative measures in situations where depression is likely to emerge
- Managers of social care settings need to be able to incorporate best practice into their policies and induction programmes for staff
The Future
- It is proposed that this programme with the recommended changes is rolled out to Barnet's social care staff working in provider services
- The provider managers will need to work with the trainers to design the evaluation elements so that the aspects of services which particularly affect them can be included in the evaluation.
See Case Study: Training for Social Care staff about Depression and its Management - London Borough of Barnet (link)
Contact details
Melanie Evans - Lead Trainer
Barnet Enfield Haringey Mental Health Trust
Melanie.evans@beh-mht.nhs.uk
Date 27.7.09
