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All too often social care assessments lack structure and are unclear, unfocused and repetitive. This means the message and impact are weakened or lost. When writing assessments and support plans we need to do so in a clear, concise, relevant and meaningful way. And that means taking the reader (whoever that may be) with us every step of the way. We simply need to convince them that we know what we are talking about and are worth listening to.

Assessments will be read, understood and followed if they are easy to read, easy to understand and easy to follow. Research, inspections and inquiries have all raised concerns that social care assessments often lacks analysis and the child or service user’s voice. All too frequently, writing is mainly narrative and descriptive. There is a lot of information and a lot of facts. But we need to make sense of those facts and that information. What do they tell us? Why do they tell us that? What should we do as a consequence of that? Use the evidence to form your thinking

Supporting people with dementia and their carers throughout the dementia journey delivered by Dementia Trainer Janet Lallysmith 

Delegates must attend part 1 & 2 to complete the course.

This one-day course split over two consecutive days enables delegates to understand how best to support a person with dementia and their carers from diagnosis through to end of life

Who should attend?
Anyone with an understanding of dementia and person-centred care who is involved in the care or support of people with dementia in any setting

This course is a virtual course run via Zoom or Teams - joining instructions will be sent to via diary invite a week before the course date.

Please note, this course will have regular breaks for participants so please ensure you take yourself away from the screen. The course is aimed to be interactive.

This is a one day course including theory and practice

Who Should Attend?

New staff whose role directly or indirectly involves the handling of people should attend this course. 

This course requires delegates to be enrolled on the ICDL programme before booking on this course and charges may apply. Please email ICDL@Portsmouthcc.gov.uk for more information.

ICDL Extra is a recognised qualification at Level 2 and is deemed to be equivalent with GCSE grades A* to C.

ICDL Extra builds on the users basic knowledge of Microsoft Office and improves their understanding of Word, Excel and PowerPoint

This 2 and half hour virtual workshop is to help managers to support the wellbeing of their staff, working in a hybrid environment.

This is the link to the event.

***THIS TRAINING IS FOR CHILDREN'S SOCIAL CARE STAFF ONLY***

‘You lot don’t care! You’re going to take our kids away and you get a bonus for that’
‘Why aren’t you going to the neighbours down the road, they’re much worse than us!’
‘What do you know? Do you have kids of your own?’

Are these kinds of ‘heart-sink’ phrases familiar? Do you or your staff frequently find themselves on the defensive as practitioners or as managers? In an environment of diminishing resources and increasing demand on services, we need a fresh and imaginative approach.
Motivational Interviewing is a framework of intervention, brought together in the 1990s by Professor William Miller and Professor Stephen Rollnick. It is an approach designed to work with those most resistant to change or stuck in entrenched behaviours. The premise of Motivational Interviewing is that motivation is not a ‘fixed state’ that a person does or does not have. Rather, motivation ebbs and flows depending on many factors such as circumstances, mood and so forth. The skilled practitioner (or manager) will harness whatever very little motivation there might be, and help it move in the right direction. The Motivational Interviewing approach borrows in from other sources such as Carl Rogers’ person-centred counselling; Socratic thinking and Prochaska & DiClemente’s Cycle of Behaviour change.
The key principles are:
• Engagement with the client, rather than doing something to them – i.e. change cannot be forced or pushed on to someone. It has to be internal for the client to be meaningful and long term.
• Rolling with resistance (NB this is not rolling over or being passive)
• Express empathy
• Avoid conflict
• Developing discrepancy in client’s thinking
• Support self-responsibility
Clients are often stuck or ambivalent about making changes for themselves. Practitioners can easily collude with this ‘stuckness’, or out of frustration try to push people to action, which only increases resistance. Motivational Interviewing helps to make the practitioner aware of these tendencies, and give them options to work more powerfully in ways that create more possibility of change for their clients.
Our MI training course gives a highly interactive and practical experience of Motivational Interviewing, and its potential power to engage with people meaningfully, rather than do something to them. There will be opportunities for demonstration, discussion, and questions, conducted in ways that model the principles of a motivational skills approach. We will explore together how we can all nurture even the smallest steps of progress, with the emphasis on encouragement and trying to bring out the best in others as well as ourselves.

This practical course offers an opportunity to try out a notebook based reflective ‘to-do list’ system and explore ways of integrating resilience and self-care strategies into busy lives.

The course is tailored to meet the needs of managers and leaders in social work and related settings. We will use an adaptation of the Bullet Journal to explore some of the latest thinking on effective systems and habits which support focus, intentional working and personal wellbeing.

This training has a maximum group size of 10 and provides a safe space to share ideas and troubleshoot challenges with other managers. Participants are invited to try out this adaptation of the Bullet Journalling system as a month long experiment.

Trauma informed model of care (TIMOC) training is aimed at social workers, personal advisors and foster carers working with children and young people who experienced trauma. The training will explain the impact of trauma on our body and how our mind processes information,help participants in the training to better understand behaviour often linked to you people who have experienced trauma. The Training will cover signs and symptons of trauma adding assessments of young people's needs in this area. The training then goes onto explore how to meet the care needs of these young people, with practical advice for everyday care. Simple direct tools which can be used by all will also be explained. The course will also cover Fast Feet, explaining this theraputic intervention.

How should attend: Social Workers, personal advisors and foster carers working with children and young people who have experienced trauma.