Not just training: strengths-based practice in social care

We wrote this guide using the experiences and feedback of people who work in social care in Wales.

The guidance explains:

• the different skills, knowledge and values workers, managers and leaders need
• how to decide which training will meet your needs
• how to make sure the training is high-quality, whether it’s being run internally or externally.

It isn’t a comprehensive guide, but it can be a helpful starting point.

This guide is for anyone who wants to help their organisations work in a strengths-based way, including:

• leaders
• commissioning managers
• workforce training leads.

We wrote this guide to help people working in social care in Wales to get consistent, high-quality training, learning and development that’s relevant to their role and responsibilities.

Welsh Government expects social care and health services to practise a co-productive and strengths-based model of social care.

This means moving away from solutions that are led by services or use resources to fix problems.

Instead, we should work with someone’s strengths to help them achieve what matters to them.

While lots of teams already work in this way, it can be hard to make sure this way of working is consistent across different organisations.

This guide gives organisations a structure to make it easier to work with strengths, in a realistic, manageable and consistent way.

Strengths-based practice supports the principles of the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act (2014), and helps us to promote voice, choice and control.

The Act promotes the well-being of the citizens of Wales, focusing on prevention, early intervention and working collaboratively with individuals and their families.

Find out more about strengths-based practice in social care.

There are benefits to working with other organisations to build strengths-based cultures in organisations.

If you’d like to find out more about this, email strengths@socialcare.wales

People need different levels of knowledge, depending on their role.

This guide splits roles into three groups, to help you decide how to develop strengths-based practices in your organisation.

Group 1: people who work with citizens

The people in this group need to understand why a strengths-based approach is preferable to a deficit or “what’s wrong” model.

They should know the spirit and principles of strengths-based practices and describe the benefits of this way of working.

Group 2: supervisors and managers

The people in this group should should be familiar with strengths-based approaches.

They should know how to supervise in a way that promotes positive outcomes for their colleagues and the people they support.

They should have done everything in group 1.

Group 3: leaders and commissioners

People in this group should be familiar with strengths-based approaches.

They should know how to improve, measure and monitor practice quality in their organisation.

It’s helpful for people in this group to be familiar with the knowledge and skills we’ve outlined for groups 1 and 2.