Staff training
Ideal Academy: turning care into a career
Leeds-based Ideal
Carehomes offers residential care across 22 homes throughout Yorkshire, the Northwest and the Midlands, employing over 1,000 people. Here, head of development and engagement Sarah Colling, discusses its Ideal Academy and the benefits of training and development programmes within the care industry
Ideal Carehomes’ Ideal Academy was born from a passion to provide the best quality training, development and support for care, ancillary and management staff across all levels and job roles. Prior to the Academy, we felt training and development could be improved to achieve higher levels of staff retention and job satisfaction.
With the help of Ideal Carehomes’ senior leadership team, I launched the Ideal Academy last year to provide a training and development package to suit staff at all stages of their career, considering different ambitions and goals. This not only focuses on nurturing those who want to develop their career, but also looks at what Ideal can offer to those who are looking for more job fulfilment and responsibilities. Over the past 12 months, through the newly implemented employee
development strategies, we have seen staff morale, internal progression and recruitment and retention skyrocket. Feedback from staff has been fundamental to the success of the Ideal Academy, especially capturing data from surveys with new recruits during their induction training.
They help us to identify key topics and focus points that work towards improving and shaping how we deliver our industry leading training.
#thisisme initiative
Our #thisisme initiative aims to bring staff and residents together by finding out more about the person behind the uniform and the resident in the home. This project led to care teams creating wonderful bonds and friendships with one another and their residents, which has seen fantastic results
The Ideal Academy’s induction training focuses on three key frameworks: theoretical knowledge, practical application of knowledge, and continuous learning and specialist skills training
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on the impact of personalised care. Staff, residents and their relatives work together to create and complete a #thisisme booklet that details the resident’s life history, important relationships, lifetime achievements, likes and dislikes and hobbies and interests. The book is constantly updated, and residents freely share as much or as little of their lives as they choose.
By knowing more about their residents, our staff is able to deliver personalised care and activities plans. #thisisme has become a powerful tool for linking like- minded staff and residents together to create special bonds and also helps new residents settle into their new home quicker and feel at ease from the start. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) noted the positive use of the #thisisme initiative in their January 2020 report for Fairway View in Nottingham, when the home was rated ‘Outstanding’ overall. The inspector wrote, ‘The registered manager had gone out of their way to promote links to people's past and interests that were meaningful to them. ‘Documentation called 'This is me' was used to link people's needs and care to choices they made. Staff told us that for one person they linked the information from their 'This is me' information to their 90th birthday
www.thecarehomeenvironment.com • November 2020
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