Embedding an outcome focused approach in Monmouth

00:00

So in Monmouthshire we now have 12 mentors and we will have another 5 after

00:04

the next piece of work. What we did is we took the collaborative

00:09

communication training and we sort of broke it up into bite-sized pieces the

00:15

bite-sized pieces that we felt people needed the opportunity to revisit and

00:19

then to practice and it's practice, practice, practice.

00:23

So, we work in pairs - the person that I work with is a Direct Care Lead. OTs and

00:32

physios work together with social workers, you know

00:35

you're not all social workers anyway and we each, each pair tries to

00:41

deliver a mentor session three times a year. The sessions are about two hours

00:47

long, we normally have somewhere between 8 and 15 people coming to a mentor

00:54

session. They're bite-sized pieces of the training as I say and these are the

01:00

overarching sort of headings that we advertise. Who benefits from coming to

01:06

these sessions? Every member of staff benefits for different reasons,

01:10

we often talk in terms

01:17

of our workforce loosely falling into thirds, a third spent a day with Rhoda and

01:24

thought "oh my god this is fantastic I want to, you know, get on with it". Then

01:29

there's a third who think "oh this is the emperor's new clothes you know we're

01:34

going to be, we've done this before it'll soon go away", and then the third in

01:38

the middle who've needed a lot more support. So the mentor sessions people

01:45

can self-select but equally as supervisors and team managers for people

01:50

who are struggling and finding it a bit more difficult you can direct them to

01:54

those sessions so it's somewhere that you can pass people on to to continue to

01:58

have more help. Okay like we said we do lots of training with people,

02:08

we've done lots of collaborative communication but still there are times

02:12

when you think "what is it about this that people

02:15

are struggling with? Why is it that they don't get some of this, or do they get it

02:20

but they just find it quite difficult to write it down and to record it?". So despite

02:26

all the efforts that we've put in, we have an IT system now

02:29

whereby people have to put personal outcomes down at the end of every

02:34

assessment or through the assessment process and they are scored, so from the

02:41

person themselves, so we took some of the outcomes, some, we took about 700 of the

02:49

outcomes and I read through them and from a thirds perspective

02:54

a third of them you sort of go "whoa, that's amazing",

02:57

a third you go "you're getting there but it just needs something else", a third were

03:04

"have you been listening, do you understand, do you know what we are doing

03:09

and why?". And then that's a third a third and a third makes one, but there was

03:15

still also a little percentage that were complete howlers where you think "oh my

03:18

god are you really qualified?". 'To be hoisted by the nurses' - that was a

03:30

personal outcome on somebody's file and you think, really? So we did

03:37

this activity this exercise which went down

03:40

really well so basically we put loads of outcomes on people's on

03:46

tables and people in teams looked at the outcomes and they had to score them they

03:50

had to rate them - is that a red outcome

03:55

(red being not a great outcome), is that an amber outcome (as in, you're nearly there

04:00

or it could be good) and is that a green outcome (which is great). Now the impact

04:04

that this had on our staff has been really, really, really quite inspiring

04:10

because they've all looked at some of those outcomes and gone "oh my goodness I

04:15

really do write things like that" and they've really thought about how they

04:20

have so easily at times slip from being person-centered and

04:27

person-focused back into that 'service' sort of language or back into professional

04:33

language, you can read some of the outcomes and you know whether you're

04:36

looking at the outcome of a social worker, a physio, an OT by the language

04:40

that's written.