News & Stories
Feeling Settled Toolkit
The National Development Team for Inclusion has partnered with Choice Support and Golden Lane Housing to improve housing rights and security of tenure for disabled and older people by developing the Feeling Settled Toolkit. This builds on Feeling Settled: a guide for those involved in changing a service from a Residential Care Home to Supported Living where people stay in the same place, which was published in 2011.
The new Feeling Settled Toolkit provides readers with examples of good practice and valuable resources for each step of the person centred Individual Pathway proposed in the original report. The Individual Pathway is at the core of this Toolkit, emphasising that although there are many challenges in effecting change, it is essential that the person stays at the heart of the process throughout.
Rob Greig, Chief Executive, NDTi says: “The Feeling Settled Toolkit ….emphasises how this is more than just a legal or bureaucratic change, but is fundamentally about using person centred approaches to listen to the person and ensure they end up with choice and control over the housing and support they want and need.”
John Verge, GLH’s Regional Business Development Manager (South), Golden Lane Housing says: "... we know how crucial it is to ensure that the right legal frameworks and arrangements are put in place to support these changes and we are pleased to be able to support the development of this toolkit."
Sarah Maguire, Director of Quality, Choice Support, says: “We have to acknowledge that older models of support sometimes hold people back, but if we have the courage to change how we do things we can see real positive change in people’s lives.”
The Feeling Settled Toolkit can be downloaded free of charge from the NDTi website here.
Feeling Settled: a guide for those involved in changing a service from a Residential Care Home to Supported Living where people stay in the same place can be downloaded here.
Choice Support has published resources for the Feeling Settled Toolkit available to download here.
Can assistive technology (AT) replace night wake staff?
Community Living magazine has just published an article about the conclusion of a project in Southwark run by Choice Support and the London Borough of Southwark. The project was to replace night wake staff with sleep-ins and found that using AT allowed people to develop skills which led to more independence and privacy.
Read the Community Living article here
A full report of the Southwark project called Better Nights, published by the Centre for Welfare Reform (Ellis & Sines 2012), can be read here
CQC publishes review of privacy, dignity and nutrition in care homes and hospitals
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has published its first dedicated review of privacy, dignity and nutrition in both care homes and hospitals. The review is based on the findings of inspections carried out in summer 2012.
Inspection teams included people with experience of using services, called Experts by Experience. Choice Support is the lead support organisation contracted by CQC to recruit, train and manage Experts by Experience, and 18 people it manages as a part of this work were involved in the review.
See here for further information about the review.
Experts by Experience in The Guardian
Choice Support's work in the Care Quality Commission's (CQC) Experts by Experience programme is profiled here in the The Guardian.
Experts by Experience are people with experience of services who help CQC with inspections. Choice Support is the lead support organisation contracted by CQC to recruit, train and manage Experts by Experience.
Experts by Experience on the BBC
On March 12 BBC Radio 4's PM programme ran an exclusive story about a Care Quality Commission (CQC) hospital inspection. One of the CQC team helping with the inspection was an Expert by Experience, a person with direct experience of using health and social care services. Choice Support is the lead support organisation contracted by CQC to recruit, train and manage Experts by Experience.
You can listen to the programme on BBC iPlayer and read about the inspection here.
See here for more about Choice Support's work with Experts by Experience.
