Interview: how we provide learning and development to support person-centred care

We spoke to Manjinder Boo Dhiman (‘Boo’), Registered Manager at Lee Mount Care Home about how they provide staff training to ensure a focus on person-centred care.

Skills for Care: What does person-centred care mean to you?

Boo: It's very important to us to provide every person that we support with an individual experience. The support we give to each person is tailored to that individual as much as we can possibly can. And that same ethos applies to staff too – each of our staff is respected and appreciated for who they are as an individual.

This is something that we were proud to be recognised for in our Care Quality Commission (CQC) report.

It means not taking a blanket approach to everyone and finding out as much as you can about each person - about what makes them who they are. That includes their history, their interests, their beliefs. From knowing that information, you can tailor the support that you offer them.

In our care home we have older people who have a lot of history, so we’ve tried take bits out of that history and implement it into the kind of things that we do in the care and support that we offer them.

SfC: Do you have any examples of that?

B: We have one woman we support who joined us with quite advanced dementia. Her speech was limited but we knew that she loved to read and was very intelligent about a number of different topics. So, we gave her a variety of different books to read on different subjects, and after a while she started to read the books out loud which has really helped her to develop her speech and her overall communication. It was a very simple thing to do, and it didn’t cost us anything, but it’s made such a difference for her.

SfC: What learning and development do you provide to staff about person-centred care?

B: We tend to look out for specific areas of training that would be beneficial in providing person-centred care to the individual people we support.

For example, if someone we are supporting has a particular condition or cultural belief we provide training for the staff to better understand and support this specific element of that person’s identity.

SfC: Do you have any examples of that?

B: We were supporting a man from a Muslim background, and we wanted all the staff to understand the different elements of his belief – from food to praying. To do this we arranged for one of the imams from the local Mosque to attend our all staff meeting and they explained different cultural aspects of the religion and why things were done in certain ways. I think this really made the staff feel more confident in providing the best personalised care to this individual.

We also had a man with Parkinson's disease, and so we wanted the staff to fully understand the condition. So, we invited someone from Parkinson’s UK to our staff meeting and they explained more about the condition. They did a question and answer session with the staff which allowed the staff to ask really specific questions about how they could provide the best support to this individual.

Does it cost a lot of time and money to offer this type of training?

No, it didn’t cost us any money and we utilised time that we already had booked into the staff calendar for team meetings. The key is thinking about who and what you can access in your local community. People who are experts on different areas are happy to come in and share their knowledge to help us better support the people we provide care to. You just need to think outside the box sometimes.

Have you been doing any other forms of training?

We recently undertook some virtual reality training to provide us with a greater understanding of dementia. We put on a virtual reality headset and it simulated some of the barriers people with dementia may experience. It then asks you to complete different tasks; this provides a greater empathy and understanding of the additional challenges people with dementia may face when undertaking these tasks. It means that when staff are providing care they can think back and remember what it felt like when they were in that environment. The staff reported that they really enjoyed this training session, and I think that’s so important to mix up different ways of learning and different topics to keep everyone engaged and developing.

For more information and inspiration on learning and development have a look at our #KeepLearning spotlight.

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