4 ways to embed Person Centred Care into your learning culture

Person Centred Care is a set of Principles

Person Centred Care is more than just a training course, a check box, a new mode of care. It’s a set of principles that protect our loved ones when they are most vulnerable. Person Centred Care is, let’s face it, how care should be, but the reality is often different with factors ranging from staff shortages, time and resource constraints, to ineffective training and lack of experience.

So what do we do about it?

In order to retain new information, we need to practise. Practising in different environments will help it to sink in. Think about the way we learn to walk and talk, we practise, with different people in different places and eventually, become skilled all terrain communicators. The more varied our experience the better we become.

Here are 4 ways you can adopt a person centred approach in the development of your people.

1. Listen. It’s an obvious one, but it’s also an easy one to put off, be too busy for, or leave on the to-do list. Taking, or more to the point, finding the time to listen is key to making your people feel respected and heard. Find out where they are in their career and where they want to be (hopefully this will align with the needs of your organisation).
2. Involve them in constructing a coordinated personal development plan that clearly shows how they can progress their career through training and development practices. Include support sessions where you can roll back to step 1 and make sure they’re still on track.
3. Be flexible and allow for difference. Each person will learn at different rates and in different ways, tailor your approach to suit the needs of the individual. Some people will need more supervision and reassurance, others will prefer to learn alone with only limited feedback.‍
4. Empower your people to see their own strengths and help them transfer these from personal skills to caring practices. Encourage independence and self development and recognise & reward the little things. It’s often these things that matter most.