Elearning | Be Inspired! Shirley Ayres Consulting

Radical proposals in the new health White Paper

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

The White Paper ‘Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS’ published yesterday reveal that power will be devolved from Whitehall to patients and professionals.

Patients will get more choice and control, backed by an information revolution. Services will be more responsive to patients and designed around them, rather than patients having to fit around services. The principle will be “no decisions about me without me”.

Under the new plans, patients will be able to choose which GP practice they register with, regardless of where they live, and choose between consultant-led teams. More comprehensive and transparent information, such as patients’ own ratings, will help them make these choices together with healthcare professionals.

Local authorities will be given statutory responsibility for bringing health and social care together under the radical NHS reforms announced by health secretary Andrew Lansley. It is planned that primary care trusts and strategic health authorities will be abolished by 2013.

The health White Paper aims to create the largest social enterprise sector in the world by increasing the freedoms of foundation trusts and giving NHS staff the opportunity to have a greater say in the future of their organisations, including as employee-led social enterprises.

Consortia of GP practices will take on responsibility for commissioning most health services from PCTs while councils will take on PCTs’ public health functions and be charged with leading the integration of health and social care locally. GP consortia will commission most health services with a few exceptions, including dentistry, community pharmacy and large-scale specialist services.

The government also announced a wide-ranging review of health and social care regulation with a view towards significantly reducing the burdens on commissioners and providers.

The health White Paper will mean a change in the role of the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE), with some of its functions in promoting and disseminating good practice in social care being transferred to a strengthened National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice). The White Paper states that ”The Health Bill will put NICE on a firmer statutory footing, securing its independence and core functions and extending its remit to social care”.

Closer integration of social care and health has been on every government agenda for many years. Putting People First and the Children’s Trusts have actively encouraged collaboration and partnerships. I hope that these radical proposals will build upon the many excellent examples of integrated working already in place which include the private and third sector. I am particularly concerned that the invaluable and innovative elearning developed by SCIE for the care sector over a number of years is maintained and further developed.

The health White Paper is the start of an extensive consultation that will take place over the coming weeks. The Department of Health will shortly be publishing a number of consultation documents to seek views on the more detailed proposals.

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Tags: choice and control, commissioning services, elearning, health and social care, integrated working, regulation of social care and health, scie

Social Care TV now online

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Get the picture with Social Care TV. An online channel for everyone involved in the social care and social work sector.

“Personalisation enables me to do the things that I took for granted for so long. My personal assistants help me to achieve my independence. Managing my own budget means that I can go to concerts, for instance at the English National Opera. I feel like I’m part of the world to which I once belonged.” Stephen Page, on Social Care TV.

It’s not always easy to explain what social care is, and Social Care TV, aims to stimulate debate about the big issues in the sector. Social Care TV programmes bring real world examples to social care staff, managers, commissioners and trainers.

This is the first time that social care has had its own TV service. Films are ‘on demand’ so they can be watched in the workplace, the training room or at home. But there aren’t just films; each web page also includes lots of guidance and advice, multimedia and e-learning resources. Social Care TV can be used as a training and learning tool; it aims to understand the needs of people who use services, by presenting real life stories and linking these to easy-to-use resources, giving staff a better understanding of good practice.

Ann Macfarlane is featured on Social Care TV. Ann now works as a social care consultant but she spent the first twenty-five years of her life in residential settings and hospitals. She says this about the film which shows how she has succeeded to change her life because of personalisation:

“It makes me proud about my achievements. I was brought up in a place where other children were dying in front of me. I didn’t have a childhood and so I feel like I’ve been making up for borrowed time. The film shows that I now live at home, run my own consultancy business and crucially, have choice, voice and control. I’m sure this film will help the workforce to do a better job and understand the role that they have to play.”

The project is run by The Social Care Institute for Excellence and has a number of innovative features.

• You can watch the films, but you can also download them from the site into presentations for training
• You can watch segments of films. You can go to a specific point of a film to address a key issue in social care practice.
• You can email a film or just a segment of a film to a colleague, making the sharing of good practice very efficient
• Users won’t just see a film on a site. There are useful text and links to specialist areas.

SCIE Chief Executive Julie Jones says:

“The films bring to life what we do every day in our work. The social care workforce is in for a treat. Along with the accompanying care and support information on the web pages, the films are thought-provoking, interesting and full of strong messages about delivering good quality, personalised social care.”

Watch Social Care TV now

Tags: education, elearning, personalisation, scie, social care, Social Care TV, Social Work

Knowledge Management in Social Care – time to embrace the internet?

Friday, January 29th, 2010

The internet revolution has transformed the way in which research and professional knowledge can be accessed and used to enhance social work practice and social care services.

But how far has this changed the experiences and perceptions of front-line adult social care staff in relation to research mindedness and professional development in its broadest sense? What are the aspirations of social care staff, and how can employers and managers encourage and support the development of a learning culture within their organisations?

A recent on-line survey of one local authority adult social care workforce highlighted some key issues. This was followed up by two focus groups where a mix of staff from different services discussed the issues raised by the survey in more depth.

Making use of internet resources

The use of the internet was clearly seen as an invaluable source of information for social workers and social care staff – almost equal to training in importance. However knowledge about what’s available via the internet was very variable, and staff didn’t feel supported to spend time exploring this medium. Even in computer dependent field work settings, surfing the net can be seen as a diversion from ‘real’ work. Management fears about social workers accessing Facebook or Ebay instead of completing on-line client records may be one factor. It was also suggested that peer pressure discouraged the use of the internet, especially in direct social care services where access to computers is more limited and culturally there’s a premium on time spent with service users as against office based working.

Discussion in the focus groups highlighted the huge potential for making use of internet resources – if only this could be filtered for relevance so that front-line staff could be directed to information of value as and when they needed it. Certain websites were recommended for easy access to the information needed, whereas others were found to be frustrating to navigate and not particularly helpful. There was a sense that greater access to internet research helped broaden people’s perspectives and increased their focus on outcomes rather than process – surely a critical factor in progress towards personalisation.

Whole team learning

There were a range of ideas about how to focus in on ‘whole team’ learning, rather than the ‘scattergun approach’ to sending individual workers off on training courses.

“Staggered training causes problems with agency cover and it could take a year to have all staff trained on for instance Mental Capacity Act so we are not all working to the same agenda.”

Allocating research and learning tasks within the team were also seen as a positive way forward, with team members presenting information as a basis for team discussions at regular intervals. This would also help to challenge the culture of not being ‘allowed’ to be seen to do internet research.

Another suggestion was that a greater emphasis on the learning and development of team managers would set a tone within the organisation which valued professional progression and training for all staff. Other ideas included the use of ‘information champions’ and more use of external training opportunities.

“I think it would help if we had information champions, people who could be freed up from their work duties to spend time researching specific subjects to pass on to colleagues so that a more thorough overview could be cascaded to work teams”

“I think seminars/workshops would be good. Funding is an issue, but we need to consider external courses to develop staff.”

Research mindedness

Of those responding to the on-line survey and attending the focus groups, most were clearly committed to learning and professional development, and there was a high level of interest in doing research. However there was a lack of knowledge about research done by colleagues, and little understanding of developments such as the Research Governance Framework introduced to local authorities some two years ago.

While there were individual stories about the role of research evidence helping to inform policies, strategies and direct work with service users, the idea that this was now the cultural norm within social care remained unconvincing.

“Research is generally done by managers, practitioners are too caught up with the day to day … behind the advice and discussion there is research knowledge – I’m guessing here ….”

Postscript

The Continuing Professional Development strategy and framework[1] developed by Skills for Care, the Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC) and other partner agencies is intended to mean changes on the frontline of service delivery. Some very practical steps need to be found to effectively integrate the three critical areas of internet resources, whole team learning and research mindedness identified in this study. This will only be possible when underpinned by determination to support the growth of organisational learning cultures in the arena of professional social care.

About the author Carolyn Barber, BSc (Hons), CQSW, is an independent consultant specialising in research, team development and management skills. Carolyn has over 25 years experience in social care as practitioner, trainer, researcher and manager, working across public, voluntary and independent sectors. For more information, go to www.wayfinderassociates.co.uk .

[1] http://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/developing_skills/Continuing_Professional_Development/Continuing_Professional_Development_(CPD)_introduction.aspx

Tags: elearning, internet social worker, post qualifying awards, professional practice, scie, Social Work

2010 – new decade, new challenges – what needs to change in social work and social care?

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

“We have enough people who tell us the way it is – now we need a few more people who can tell us how it can be!”

A brief roundup of some of the topics we will be featuring in 2010

The Advanced Practitioner – managing your career

“Find It Here” – the launch of the first comprehensive Directory of online resources for people supporting children and young people in care

The Big Ideas survey – share your thoughts about how we can improve social work and social care

Integrated Working – what stops care and health working together?

The e-Learning revolution and social media – a new approach to improve the skills and knowledge of staff in the care sector?

What makes a good employer? A simple audit tool which reveals whether your employer demonstrates that staff really are the most important resource in the organisation.

New Partnerships – Shirley Ayres Consulting will be joining up with a number of organisations who are committed to driving up standards in social work and social care.

Leadership and Management in Social Care – has the investment paid off?

An undervalued and unrecognised resource? - the launch of an exciting new website for grandparents.

Introducing Blastbeat Education UK a not for profit company that has developed a fun & exciting Music & Multimedia Business progamme offered to young people and schools around the world. Blastbeat promotes and encourages young original songwriters & musicians, supporting youth communities on a local & global level, empowering young people to create social enterprises creating community and social capital to help bring about change for the good of society.

Quality Assuring Training – do the increasing number of quality marks and standards really make a difference to the unregulated training in the care sector?

Stress busters – See life from a different angle.

BASW and the new National College for Social Work

“The insurmountable difficulties of today are the solved problems of tomorrow.” ~ Cardinal Heenan

Tags: advanced social work practice, be inspired, care sector, elearning, encouraging innovation, integrated working, Leadership and Management, Learning and Development, quality assurance, Social Work, Stress busters, training

Workstation Ergonomics – a free health and safety training course from ALISON

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

ALISON’s newest free interactive multimedia e-learning course explains the simple and inexpensive principles that help create a safe and comfortable computer workstation environment. With information, instruction and training, this Health & Safety training course will help individuals avoid accidents, injury and ill-health possibly caused by bad posture or the likes of repetitive strain injury (RSI) and other poor habits formed around the office or home computer.

The course will be of special interest to employers, especially those in small & medium enterprises as a tool to assist in meeting health and safely obligations in the workplace. ALISON provides free group management functionality that allows any trainer, tutor or teacher to create a learning group to which they can invite learners. The benefit is that all tracked learning by the learners of the group can then be easily documented, in terms of lessons covered, grades achieved and time spent.

Enrol on this free course today at ALISON

Welcome to ALISON which enables anyone, anywhere, to educate themselves for free via interactive self-paced multimedia.

Tags: alison, elearning, ergonomics, free on line learning, health and well being, internet social worker, scie, Stress busters

The Internet Social Worker

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

Learn how to use the Internet for your studies or your work. Did you know about the Internet Social Worker a free, interactive tutorial which will help improve your internet skills?

This is an excellent resource which allows you to tour the best of the web for Social Work, discover how to search the Internet effectively, judge which websites are worth using and read stories to inspire you.

The Intute: Virtual Training Suite is a national Internet service provided by the Intute (formerly the RDN) and funded by JISC (an agency of The Higher and Further Education Funding Councils of England, Scotland and Wales).

The service offers over 60 free, online tutorials teaching Internet skills for different subjects, and is free to access via the Web.

It is run by the Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol (UK), though the content has been written by a distributed team of tutors, lecturers and librarians from across the country.

Who is it for?

The tutorials have been designed for different audiences. Some are designed for students and staff in universities or colleges, some are for adult and community learners so they differ slightly, but they are all free for anyone to use.

You can use them to “teach yourself” by working through them in your own time. They are also designed to be a flexible eLearning resource that can be easily adopted by tutors, lecturers and librarains in a wide range of courses. Worth a visit especially if you are just finding your way around the internet. Access it here

The site also provides a useful Glossary of computing terminology and words used in the tutorials.

blog -Blogs are Web logs kept by individuals, groups or organisations to record thoughts, ideas, work notes or outcomes on the Web chronologically. Readers can comment on blog posts and post discussion comments.

Tags: elearning, internet social worker, learning about the internet, websites

Inspired partnership promotes education on HIV/AIDS, disease prevention, child care, agriculture and human rights in the developing world

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

Thare Machi Education (TME) is a UK-registered charity working with community-based partners in the developing world, helping to give women and children trapped in poverty more knowledge and more choice. The Starfish project develops cheap and reliable DVD technology in the users’ own language, and connects with community groups at a grassroots level, TME is working with Eurotalk Interactive to produce one hundred audiovisual lessons on key topics in the languages of the world’s poor.

ALISON, the world’s leading free online learning resource is working with TME to bring many of their educational programmes onto the ALISON free learning platform. This will allow TME to make their content accessible to a massive new online audience worldwide, thus creating another distribution channel to engage with their target audience. In addition, using ALISON’s extensive education and NGO network, it is hoped and expected that TME can greatly extend the reach of its courses.

Commenting on the alliance, Steve Clark, CEO of TME said “ALISON is a terrific opportunity for TME to extend the reach of our educational content far beyond our current distribution network. Mike Feerick, CEO of ALISON stated that ALISON was delighted to welcome TME as a free publisher on ALISON: “We had heard of the effectiveness of the TME videos in the developing world. What surprises most people today is just how much of the world actually enjoys Internet access. The addition of the TME courses is the beginning of our campaign to extend our health literacy portfolio which we intend to make very comprehensive and of course, free to access, over the coming year.”

Both TME and ALISON agree that the need for education in these areas is tremendous. For example, life expectancy in Malawi in 2000 was only 37 years compared with 77 within the UK. Twelve million children in Africa have been made orphans by the AIDS pandemic, and in some communities women in particular have never even heard of AIDS, let alone know how to avoid it. So far, more than 15 million people in Africa are estimated to have died from AIDS – more than the highest estimates of the Iraq war, the Rwandan genocide, the Khmer Rouge regime and the Holocaust combined. TME has active programmes in India, Kenya, South Africa, Cambodia, Uganda, Malawi, Nepal, Zambia, Bulgaria and Romania.

ALISON is committed to extending its free learning offerings, and is interested in hearing from organizations similar to TME about how global health problems can be addressed through the power of the internet.

http://alison.com/ http://www.tme.org.uk/

Tags: alison, charity, developing countries, elearning, free on line learning, inspired, new technology, ngo, power of the internet, thare machi education, the world's leading free online learning resource, third world, tme, unique

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Be Inspired! Shirley Ayres Consulting

Posts Tagged ‘elearning’

Radical proposals in the new health White Paper

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Social Care TV now online

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Knowledge Management in Social Care – time to embrace the internet?

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2010 – new decade, new challenges – what needs to change in social work and social care?

“We have enough people who tell us the way it is – now we need a few more people who can tell us how it can be!”

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Workstation Ergonomics – a free health and safety training course from ALISON

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The Internet Social Worker

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Inspired partnership promotes education on HIV/AIDS, disease prevention, child care, agriculture and human rights in the developing world

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