Shaping a Vision – Values Matching

From our experience within our professional careers, we have found that when developing a service to provide care and support for individuals who have complex care needs, it is imperative for each person who is providing and receiving the support, to share common values, attitudes and beliefs in order to ensure the best possible outcomes are met all round.

Company Values
As a company providing complex care within our services we value the dignity of all people and view all individuals as equals whilst respecting each other’s differences. We believe that everyone is able to achieve their goals with the right support.

The following values are most important to us as an organisation:

Passionate, Inclusive, Ambitious, Innovative, Empowering and Loyal.

We fully embrace a person-centred approach and aim to empower the people we support to exercise personal choice whilst supporting the right to freedom and expression.

Staff Values
We believe that staff providing support in our services should share the values which are important to us as an organisation. We look to identify these values in prospective staff members from the very beginning of our recruitment process onwards.

Prior to our transition from a service providing residential and nursing care to a service providing complex care we carried out an activity with our current staff called ‘Shaping a Vision’. This was to determine whether our current staff’s values were matched to ours as a company and to map out a plan for the future standards of care and support to be provided within our services.

The activity highlighted the following values of our existing staff team:

• ‘To have a positive attitude towards work and life’
• ‘To be loyal to the people we support, their families and the orginisation’
• ‘To empower ourselves and the people we support’
• ‘To advocate and speak up for the people we support’
• ‘To communicate well with each other’
• ‘To build positive relationships with the people we support and their families’

In conclusion this activity showed us that the existing staff team not only shared our company values but were also keen to further develop communication with the people we support and those actively involved in their care.

The PROACT-SCIPr-UK Approach
The values-based approach of PROACT-SCIPr-UK is used within our complex services as a framework and emphasises Proactive support whilst focusing on ‘getting it right’ for the individuals we care for. The aim of PROACT-SCIPr-UK is to improve individual’s quality of life whilst enabling staff to become mindful practitioners.

The PROACT-SCIPr-UK Approach is the underpinning of all that we do from the way we write our support plans, to our policies and procedures, to inducting new staff into our teams.

PROACT-SCIPr-UK believes that everyone is unique in their own learning style and that all people can learn and develop.

We believe that this applies not only to the people we support but to our staff members too. As part of the PROACT-SCIPr-UK Approach we ensure that our staff members are ‘matched’ to the people they are supporting where possible, sharing hobbies, interests and personality traits. This led to the development of ‘Core Teams’ within our services.

In a Nutshell…

Values, attitudes and beliefs need to be shared in order to effectively meet the goals of our staff and those they are supporting, however big or small they may be.

It is evident that our values, attitudes and beliefs affect our communication with others which inevitably influences the behaviours we see as a response.

By using Values Matching we feel confident that our teams are of the highest calibre and provide the best possible quality of care for the individuals they are supporting.