>>Graham Woodham: The programme itself is a professional development programme. It’s
not an academic taught programme with academic credits. It’s a blended set of learning
resources that help people to develop professionally, and help people to think about their own professional
development, which is really important. We have a number of workshops where leadership
issues and leadership theories and especially systems leadership thinking are explored.
Alongside that everyone is part of an action learning set and we do real learning in those
action learning sets based on the reality of everyone’s working lives and working
situations. Alongside that everybody does a leadership impact project so actually this
is about how do I apply my leadership learning and thinking in practice on an everyday basis
and I can I then demonstrate and share that learning with other people.
>>Sharon Blackburn: To see nurse leaders from a variety of settings in social care at management
level and above participating in this programme, coming in at the beginning with a need to
develop confidence, to understand what their contribution could be, to how they could contribute
not just to their local setting but the wider social care environment. And to see where
we are today, which is the culmination of the course; to see the projects that they
have delivered upon and to hear their stories, it’s amazing, because the programme has
not only given them confidence but it’s given them the language to help them articulate
what their distinct contribution is as nurse leaders in the social care setting. These
nurse leaders have been able to reflect on their own practice but also the practice of
their teams. >>Freny Fernandes: I just thought it was incredibly,
so so good, so powerful so empowering, it just made me a totally sort of different type
of person, I’ve come a long way in the last six months, it’s helped me build my confidence.
>>Sabina Kelly: The feedback sessions that we’ve had, the learning tools that we’ve
had. Not only have they been good for me personally but I will use all the stuff that I’ve learnt
on the course and implement it with my carers, with my support workers.
>>Nicola Johnstone: My project was to try to empower the coaching and mentoring skills
of existing staff to support new starters. We deliver a really good corporate induction
but when they were going on to the households the existing staff some of them didn’t have
the time to put in to coaching and supporting the new starters to a high standard. We had
that feedback so we went back to basics and we delivered a mentoring session to identify
the existing staff where they were not so confident in coaching and mentoring the new
starters, and we also took the people that did have the confidence in coaching and mentoring
to buddy up with them, so it was a bit of a helping hand for everybody.
>>Robert McCullough: For my project I developed peer reviewing of care plans and risk assessments.
It’s kind of universally used across the care sector but within our organisation we
haven’t actually utilised it yet and it’s given me the confidence to take that forward
within the team and to develop it within the team.
>>Raluca Frandos: My project is compassion in end of life so every time we have a resident
in end of life I am doing ten minutes meeting with the staff so we spoke about that resident,
about their symptoms, about any change. They can ask any question if they have concerns
and I found it very helpful and I found that we add more value in the care of the resident,
so we really had good feedback from the carers and the families.
>>Susan Aitkenhead: Nursing, midwifery and care staff and identify and address unwarranted
variation and by doing so ensure that their practice is equitable for those that they
care for and can demonstrate improved outcomes, experience and resources. I am really pleased
that the work that has been happening within this course will be demonstrated and published
on our webpages to help disseminate this work and share this great practice with others.