At accomplish we encourage people to lead a full and valued life, enabling people to live more independently through a programme of active support and engagement, in life opportunities and to be part of the community where they live.
We believe it is important to listen to the people we support and work with them to identify their personal goals,
whilst also listening to their ideas for service improvements. Our commitment to listening has ensured the people we support are central to our person-centred planning strategy.
In 2016 we considered how we could better engage people supported in our service improvements, utilising their strengths and their experience and providing them with opportunity for skill development and paid employment. This led us to launching a new initiative which involved the recruitment of eight of the people we support to be our paid Quality Checkers.
The concept behind this initiative was that the Quality Checkers would work alongside our Quality Auditing team and bring an expert by experience perspective to the audit. They would be well placed to engage with people living in the service being audited and their observations would be judged by their own experience of what good care and support is and thus they would provide valuable insight for us to ensure we are providing the best service possible. Individuals who showed an interest in this initiative received an informal interview and those who were successful received training for their new role which included auditing skills, safeguarding and confidentiality. They were then buddied up with an experienced auditor.
This role is particularly valuable to the organisation in conducting cultural audits and viewing the service through the eyes of someone who receives support. This initiative continues each year and has given people confidence in their own skills and has given them valuable work experience.
This is what Ryan one of our Quality Checker’s had to say about his role, “Being a Quality Checker has given me purpose. I am so much more confident now in myself. I really enjoy the work and feel I am making a difference”.
During late 2018 into 2019 accomplish has embarked on a new Safeguarding Awareness and Enablement Project, the aim of which is to provide awareness training for the people we support to ensure that they are fully aware about what abuse means including subtle abuse. We want everyone to know how they can keep safe, and to ensure that they know that they have a right to be safe and free from abuse.
We want to ensure that they feel enabled (have the words or communication means) and empowered (have the confidence, within the right culture) to speak up for themselves and for others. This is an exciting co-production project which involves the people we support on the steering committee and as paid co-trainers. As part of this project we are also identifying Safeguarding Champions from amongst the people we support and from within our staff teams. We will be training up trainers and co-trainers to provide Keeping Safe training to everyone we support across all our services. People we support will receive training as co-trainers/facilitators which will be a paid role. This train the trainer training is planned for April 2019 and will then be rolled out to everyone during 2019. This is a great opportunity for the people we support to receive training to train others and to be part of a project that can really make a difference to the lives of everyone we support.
