SCA Champions New Approach to Care
Southampton-based SCA Group is marking national Dignity Action Day on February 1st by championing a new approach to care.
SCA is investing in ‘Everyone Matters’ training for all its employees and managers in 2011/12 with a view to changing the culture of the entire organisation and improving the way it provides care to its customers. The new approach says care givers should be given higher status and people who are cared for should be treated with more compassion and respect.
The training, taking in everyone who works or volunteers for SCA as well as many of its partners, is being delivered by Frameworks4Change. Frameworks4Change is a company which aims to elevate the status of care-giving and improve the quality of care-giving in residential, day and home care settings.
Everyone Matters aims to build a culture of compassion throughout the entire organisation, taking in not just the way customers and families are treated but also the way that SCA relates to its staff and partners. The aim is for care givers to feel valued and listened to, for customers and their families to be seen as partners in care and for SCA leaders to model the Everyone Matters approach in everything from documents and care plans to their own behaviour.
The workshops and road shows began in September 2011 and will continue for several months in 2012 as the training is rolled out to staff in Southampton, the New Forest, Portsmouth, Poole and other areas of Hampshire and Dorset.
“A lot of organisations talk about improving the quality of care for their customers, but we are really committed to this,” said Maria Mills, CEO of SCA.
“We want to empower our staff to work more creatively and to provide services that customers really want. Service contracts can sometimes be quite rigid and prescriptive, so it is a challenge, but everyone involved in supporting a customer must ensure that care is fully shaped by the person at the centre.
“Everyone Matters training can help with this. It encourages people to really listen to what customers want and feel and to appreciate different perspectives. It helps staff to reflect on what they do and how they do it and to aim for continuous improvement.”
Frameworks4Change says that caring, although often well-meaning, can sometimes be mechanical, authoritarian or overprotective, and that genuine compassion involves qualities such as patience, empathy, respect, dignity, kindness, mindfulness, profound listening and warmth. Profound listening is defined as really listening to what someone says without distraction or being judgemental as well as giving the person full attention.
