OUR RESIDENTS CHOOSE OUR STAFF

Here at Abiden Care Home, Burnley we now fully involve our residents in the employment and interview processes of recruiting new staff members. Those who choose to live with us for their physical, psychological and social wellbeing are those best placed to know what they need and want from those who provide their care. A resident's wealth of knowledge and experience make them the ideal choice to make up the interview panel when appointing those who are going to care for them.

Keith and Christine, our live in married couple set questions and scenarios for the candidates and joined the manager and others in undertaking the interviews. With permission, we took a photo of each candidate so members of the panel could later recall more accurately who they had interviewed, when the discussions took place about who was the right candidate for the position on offer. Keith, being a former head teacher had the perfect skills to bring the best out of the candidates.

Lorraine another resident who lives at Abiden being a health care assistant and medic with Bupa in her previous years questioned our candidates regarding person centred care and Theresa with her life skills had some questions around attitude and reliability of staff.

Once the interviews were completed , we met as a group and choose our future employee's together, we hope to have a strong team going forward from the decisions we made.

We had discussed the involvement of residents being part of the interview process , at our regular residents meeting and going forward will always involve them in any recruitment for the home.?

The feedback from all candidates interviewed was that they felt having input from residents to be really important and the overall outcome was a real success.

Paul TM Smith. Director of care, quality and operations and the group Nominated Individual commented?

'The work being undertaken by our Registered manager Amanda and her team is exemplary in meeting the Care Quality Commission quality statements - part of the new single assessment framework and in particular the QS 'We make it easy for people to share feedback and ideas or raise complaints about their care, treatment and support. We involve them in decisions about their care and tell them what’s changed as a result' the I statements which measure resident satisfaction with these particular quality markers are also being met by the three examples illustrated below

• I have care and support that is co-ordinated, and everyone works well together and with me.
• I am in control of planning my care and support. If I need help with this, people who know and care about me are involved.
• I am encouraged and enabled to feedback about my care in ways that work for me and I know how it was acted on.

When the CQC discuss their new approach to inspection and how important peoples rights and involvement in their care is they use the following markers:??

• People using services, their families, friends and advocates are the best sources of evidence about lived experiences of care. This includes their perspective of how good their care is.
• We value people’s experiences as highly as other sources of evidence and weight them equally with other evidence categories.
• We consider the context and impact of people’s experiences in our analysis.

At Abiden we believe we are demonstrating daily that good care means inclusive care and that valuing and appreciating staff is integral to our success, so much so we use staff chosen by those they will care for'