SLN pioneers new training in dementia care

4 May 2011

“This course really challenges us in the care sector and sometimes it makes you question what you thought you knew or believed.”

There are an estimated 820,000 people living with dementia in the UK, and a new Centre for Work and Learning course at Northbrook College is training professionals in the very latest techniques to support them to be actively involved in their own care.

Skills for Care, the Sector Skills Council for Social Care, is looking to establish a network of Dementia Care Champions across the country, who will take the lead on this area of work, raising the profile, inspiring others around them and training their own teams to follow the best practice models that they have been trained in.

‘Person Centred Care for those Living with Dementia’, the new short course at Northbrook College, is designed specifically to support those Managers who will be taking on the role of dedicated lead in this area of work.

Karen Stevens, Regional Development Officer at Skills for Care welcomed this new initiative.  She said “there are very flat career structures in Social Care and courses such as this open up specialist practitioner routes.  We need more advanced practitioners in dementia care”.  She invited the students completing the course to become some of the very first members of a network of Dementia Leads across the South East.

The five students completing the pilot course at Northbrook College are all senior managers within their organisations.  They were very positive about doing the course and clear about the impact it would have on their organisations. “This has been very useful – I can now establish a focused team to work in the community” said one Manager who works for Leonard Cheshire Disability. “People think of Leonard Cheshire as only working with those with physical disabilities, but more and more of our clients also have Dementia and this will really help us to know how to care for them better.  I need to be able to retrain my staff into new ways of working.” 

Students talked about how much the course had inspired them, not only enhancing their knowledge and understanding of dementia, but making them critically evaluate their own practice and that of those around them.

 
“This course really challenges us in the care sector and sometimes it makes you question what you thought you knew or believed.” says a Manager who works in Domiciliary Care – an area that he feels has sometimes been neglected in other training courses with their traditional focus on Residential Care. “The learning that we have received here on Person Centred Care techniques is so valuable and transfers to so many other areas of work that the course will help us not just to care for those with dementia, but to also improve our care processes generally."

The students, who will complete their training course by the end of May, were all proud of their achievements, and the fact that the course they have undertaken is awarded by the University of Brighton. 

“The academic side really does validate it as a training course” said one of the students, “and the assignment that we have to do makes you look at the work we have been introduced to in more depth and detail and makes you put your learning into practice.” 

They would all recommend this course to others and will be returning to their own settings where they can’t wait to cascade the new techniques they have learned, down to their own staff.

To find out more about when the next session of ‘Person Centred Care for those Living with Dementia’ is due to begin, please contact Selina Shields Bishop on: s.bishop@nbcol.ac.uk or call 01903 607 218