7 September 2010 Good Morning

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Practice Quality Mentors Scheme

Background

The Scheme aimed to recruit 3-5 qualified Social Workers and train them to become more skilled in coaching and mentoring. The purpose was to enable them to become highly skilled mentors in the area of Safeguarding Adults.

They lead on all Safeguarding Adults referrals but will coach and mentor investigating officers to ensure the investigations are carried out to the highest standard and are in line with partner organisations agencies processes and procedures.

Objectives

The aims of this scheme was to look at the practice issues in relation to safeguarding adults investigations and to ensure that they are carried out efficiently, safely and are outcome focused. We aimed to produce skilled investigators as standard and to contribute to the wider inter-professional working agenda.

The scheme dovetails with the NoTW aims and objectives in that it has been developed to show how social care can work differently, how social care learning, training, education and development are working in different ways and is focusing on workforce reform and transformation alongside service reform and transformation.

We aimed to address the skills gap and competing priorities of Assessment and Care Management, Raise intelligence, promote care standards, partnership with Safeguarding Q, PCT clinical standards and Providers, provide wide opportunity for on the job training and raising of professional standards, free up time in Assessment and Care Management to improve waiting time for assessment Performance Indicators.

We wanted to develop the expertise of a number of social workers from within Assessment and Care Management to form the basis of a mentoring unit by August 2008, which will offer coaching, mentoring and exemplar of good practice.

We hope that this approach will be further extended to include Personal Assistants (PA’s) to provide a role model/mentor for new PA's as part of another piece of work which involves developing a training matrix for PA's.

What Happened? 

The outcomes that have been achieved

• The mentors have become established standards rise and high quality service are on the way to becoming the norm
• Quality Assurance mechanisms are in place to ensure continuous improvement.
• Performance Indicators are expected to improve and will enable us to set higher local indicators to embed quality practice
• The mentors have begun to participate in staff development across the organisation from induction to CPD training to share their knowledge and skills as role models and examples of excellent practice
• We have identified the need to provide a similar role to PA's to ensure consistency of practice and support to individuals undertaking the role of PA but may be working in isolation and in need of support and guidance
• As part of a parallel project we are considering how the needs of recipients of direct payments may be best served in relation to safeguarding information and training.