Embedding an outcome focused approach in Monmouth
Listen to two practitioners talk about how they and their staff have embedded personal outcomes and sustained the new approach since doing the Collaborative Communication Skills training
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.