Leadership programme for care home managers to be launched
A pilot scheme designed to ensure that our most vulnerable residents receive high quality care from the top down is being launched.
Plymouth City Council, in partnership with NEW Devon Clinical Commissioning Group and Plymouth Community Health Care, is launching its leadership programme, which will initially be piloted in 15 care homes before being rolled across the city. It will be launched at the city’s Dementia Conference on 31 January.
Councillor Sue McDonald, Cabinet member for Public Health and Adult Social Care said: “Good social care has the potential to transform people’s lives. It can help them to realise independence, exercise meaningful choice and control over the care and support they receive, and live with dignity and opportunity.
“High quality leadership needs to run through every aspect of the social care workforce to make sure we have high quality care.”
The programme will provide individuals and organisations with a benchmark against which to measure their current leadership capability and to create targeted development plans.It entails a quality and innovative training framework which will improve the public and professional awareness and understanding of leadership.
It will also support the current quality framework for care homes by working in line with the Dementia Quality Mark, Dignity in Care Forum, the Quality Assurance Improvement Team and the Older Persons Charter.
Councillor McDonald added: “Social care is changing all the time. We are really proud of how far we have come, but there are many new initiatives which care home managers need to stay on top of. We are offering support through this programme to make sure that their staff are skilled, have a sense of pride and motivation and are trained to the meet the needs of the clients.
“Anyone who has a family member in a care home will have a flavour of the day-to-day demands, but this pilot will help with the behind-the-scenes work that goes on to ensure the very best practice is part of life of care homes in Plymouth.
“The response from the care industry has been really encouraging. We need to provide the tools for people who run care homes to become truly excellent and forward thinking. The programme aims to give managers the skill and training to step away from the day-to day of their own extremely busy workload to lead and manage their homes as effectively as possible.
“As organisations that commission services for adult social care, this partnership has a role to play in reassuring clients and their families that our city’s care homes are the best they can be.”
Stephen Waite, Chief Executive of Plymouth Community Healthcare CIC said: "As a provider of clinical services, staff from Plymouth Community Healthcare work very closely with care homes across the city. We welcome this opportunity to support the sharing of excellent practice and greater awareness of how managers and clinical leaders can work together to ensure that some of our most vulnerable people receive a consistently high quality of care.”
The Government’s White Paper, Caring For Our Future, Reforming Care and Support, which emphasises the importance of leadership at all levels from strategic to practice levels and how the sector needs to develop a pipeline of new talent who are comfortable with working across traditional boundaries and able to inspire the future workforce,
The Leadership and Management Programme for Registered Managers of Care Homes has been developed by Plymouth Adult Social Care Commissioning and will be delivered by them. It is intended to embed the building blocks from the Leadership Quality Framework from The National Skills Academy as well as offering clinical support and guidance.
Carol Green, Commissioning Manager, Complex Care NEW Devon Clinical Commissioning Group said: "NEW Devon Clinical Commissioning Group supports the progamme to improve quality in care home leadership and recognises that good leadership is vital to improve quality care."
