20 November 2008 Good Morning

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The Laurels

Summary

The Laurels Care Home in Cumbria sought to develop the role of a 'social care supporter' by enhancing the key-worker role and developing an individual skills programme with residents.

Description

The person centred residential and community supports for older people, including those with dementia proposals acknowledged the demographic challenges presented by an ageing population, the increased expectations of older people and their relatives for valued and respectful services, and the importance of people being supported in their own homes. They recognised the significance of prevention, early and local interventions in service provision. The proposals were characterised by the aspiration to provide respectful services to individuals - some of whom required technologies and 'in reach' assistance to enable them to remain in their own homes or care homes. The proposals endorsed the conviction that all older people should be spared, (i) the confusion and duplication arising from having services from lots of agencies; and (ii) the assumption that they will not benefit from the holistic approaches of competent staff.

The Laurels Care Home in Cumbria and Jewish Care in England have a great deal in common. They both wanted to raise care standards by creating more humane supports to people with dementia and were interested in drawing on the work of the Bradford Dementia Group and in particular the approaches developed by Tom Kitwood (1997). The Laurels aimed to develop the role of 'social care supporter' from that of key-worker by supporting 'every aspect of a client's health and well being…who strives to achieve the very best for the clients to give them as much out of their lives as possible.' The creation of a new role and senior social care supporter to 'train staff...demonstrate best practice and have an attitude which both values and role models the importance of this...' was supported by the New Types of Worker programme. At the outset two key workers competed a Dementia Care course and 'person centred training' was implemented into the work of those staff doing NVQ Level 2 Health and Social Care.

Laurel's Social Care Worker

While the social care worker role in the Laurel's residential care home came the closest of any of the roles to a re-labelling, it was not a pure example. Certainly the former care assistants on becoming social care workers remained responsible for providing the mainstream caring activities for residents, but there were some important shifts in the role. These involved a sharpening and a re-focusing of the work of the former care assistants, hence the classification of this role as specialist. The care assistants as social care workers moved away from dealing with routine personal tasks for residents like mending clothes and taking them to hospital appointments, which might be done by family members. Instead they were encouraged and trained to concentrate on activities that more directly related to the residents' emotional well being such as organising social events. As the home manager noted:

"Rather than assisting people with their hygiene and the meals, we felt it (the care assistant role) should be a lot more than that, more about what this resident likes to do, looking at what the person's history is, about how can we make the (residents) stay more enjoyable."