Mental Health Awareness

We are pleased to announce our support for Mental Health Awareness Week (16^th May – 22^nd May).

The Theme This Year – Relationships

Relationships are essential to maintaining good mental health. Good relationships help us live a longer and happier life.

Five Year Forward View

The Five Year Forward View for Mental Health report highlights the fact: “Mental health problems represent the largest single cause of disability in the UK. The cost to the economy is an estimated £105billion per year- roughly the cost of the entire NHS.”

People with mental health issues are constantly overlooked and not treated the same as those with a physical health need. On the 15^th February, NHS England pledged to invest more than a billion pounds a year into mental health care up until 2020/2021. The pledge is intended to help more than a million people.

Get Involved

There are many different ways you can raise awareness for mental health this week.

The Mental Health Foundation website offers tons of ideas, we have picked out 5:

Host a wellbeing walk with friends, colleagues or people in your community.

Set up a stand in your local hospital, community centre, library or supermarket.

Hold a series of lectures or talks on mental health – make it interactive and get the audience involved.

Wellbeing Breakfast– catch up with your colleagues and discuss plans. Bring in cereals, croissants, fresh fruit, sandwiches etc. and allow people to make a small donation for each item.

Tea & Talk – Talking is good for your mental health. Hold a Tea & Talk at home or work and get to know your colleagues or neighbours better, or just spend more time with your friends.

Look After Your Mental Health

Taking care of yourself and getting the most from life is largely impacted by your mental health. Making simple changes to how you live doesn’t need to cost a fortune or take up lots of your time.

Thanks to The Mental Health Foundation, here are 10 key ways to look after your mental health:

1. Talk about your feelings

2. Keep active

3. Eat well

4. Drink sensibly

5. Keep in touch

6. Ask for help

7. Take a break

8. Care for others

9. Do something you’re good at

10. Accept who you are

Read more on each of these points here.

How Embrace-Learning Can Help With Mental Health

We are a UK leading provider of quality e-learning resources, with a specific focus on Health and Social Care.

Our course titles include The Mental Capacity Act and a range of Disability Awareness courses like Supporting People with Learning Disabilities & Mental Health Needs.

You can view our full range of 50+ courses here.

View our other recent blogs here.

National Mental Capacity Action Day 2016

Aiming to increase awareness and highlight good practice of the Mental Capacity Act, the new National Mental Capacity Forum has organised the National MCA Action Day for the 15th March this year.

As an article from Community Care UK states, The Mental Capacity Act is about ‘treating people as human beings worthy of respect and time.’ The forum intends to identify MCA improvement priorities for the coming year, and work towards improving the implementation of the Mental Capacity Act at the frontline.

The Adult Principal Social Workers Network is encouraging practitioners to post comments and photos illustrating unwise decisions they have made, to highlight the importance of respecting the capacitated ‘unwise’ decisions of people receiving support. If you want to get involved, just follow the Mental Capacity Act forum on twitter @MCAatDH and use the twitter hashtags #mca and #unwisedecisionto share what decision you have made that could be considered unwise by other people.

If you want to further yours or your staffs’ knowledge of the Mental Capacity Act, we have an online training course that can help. All of the key aims and principles of this important legislation are covered, including the concepts of capacity and best interests, and the importance of the Code of Practice and how the courts become involved.

On top of this, we have MCA - specialist case studies. This course contains a set of four specialist units and has been developed specifically for practitioners working in these settings:

• Mental Health
• Acute Hospitals
• Community and Primary Care
• Residential Settings

The specialist case studies course comprises twenty different cases and can be used as the basis for staff training, refresher sessions, individual learning and continuous professional development, and as a day-to-day reference for staff. If you are working towards a CPD certificate, the Mental Capacity Act - Specialist Case Studies will award you 4 hours.
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If you are interested in training for the Mental Capacity Act or any other health and social care modules, view our catalogue of 50+ e-learning courses here and get in touch today on 0161 928 9987.

Advisory or Mandatory?

When is mandatory training not mandatory?

Apparently when it applies to the social care sector.

There’s something a bit wishy washy about labelling training as mandatory when there is no actual requirement to complete said training. Or worse still, when there is a stated ‘requirement’ to do the training (by the CQC) but there are no real consequences when the training is not completed. Unless you count a slightly lower inspection rating as a real consequence. Is it just me or is it slightly baffling that there is no legal requirement to complete any training in the delivery of social care?

Care providers themselves determine whether a training course is mandatory or not. Some will deem it mandatory while others will consider it optional. While the CQC may require that a service trains their staff to a minimum standard, this is not legally binding. It seems training is a ‘should do?’ rather than a ‘MUST DO!’

The training of care workers in the new Care Certificate is advisory rather than mandatory. The Care Certificate which is promoted as the basic or minimum entry level course is not actually a qualification as we understand the term.  It is not on the National Qualification Framework (NQF) but it is considered a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) course. This is a fantastic introduction to the world of care work and is indeed a minimum requirement for care workers. It is not, alas, mandatory unless deemed mandatory by the care provider.

We have a long way to go before we have a professionalised and regulated social care workforce. There are many reasons why it is important to achieve this. First and foremost is the quality it will bring to the care of the growing number of elderly and vulnerable people in our society. Secondly it will attach a greater value to this incredibly important work and allow carers to follow a career path with pay scales that reflect the importance of this work.  Is it the case that the current status of care work is an accurate reflection of how we as a society value care work? That is, not very highly. We are quick to jump on stories of poor care and express horror and outrage when people are abused and otherwise mistreated but when we scratch the surface a little and look at the way workers are trained and what they are paid, it is clear that the explanations for these behaviours cannot be simply dismissed as the actions of ‘rogue carers’.

Better pay will in turn attract and hold on to the right calibre of person needed by this growing social care sector. The resulting lower turnover of staff will add to the stability of the workforce which, again, will benefit the end users.

A better trained workforce with professional status will help care workers achieve something approaching parity with their health sector counterparts. This in itself will go a small way to greasing the wheels on the journey to an integrated health and social care system. The disparity in training, pay and conditions does nothing to facilitate the team spirit needed when workers are required to work across professional and organisational boundaries in the pursuit of an integrated health and social care system.

There’s an old adage that ‘Ignorance is no defence in law but training is’. I’m sure the day will come when training is, itself, a legal requirement. 

Integrating Health and Social Care

Integration of health and social care has been on the agenda since the turn of the century and has been talked about for a good deal longer. Will we still be talking about it at the turn of the next century or will someone actually be doing something about it?

Is your organisation doing something about it or are you, like the majority, merely paying lip service to what is, admittedly, a noble cause?

The logic is faultless but the application seems to be a good deal more complicated than some would have us believe. We know it’s desirable but is it really possible to bring two systems together to work seamlessly in the delivery of care? It can be difficult enough to get professionals of a similar discipline to work as a team when managing complex health and care packages. When we ask them to work across professional and organisational boundaries we’d better make sure the infrastructure is there to support them. But what is this infrastructure? What does it consist of and who is going to take responsibility for maintaining it? Are the differences in culture so different that we will never truly have an integrated system?

Multidisciplinary teams already exist to manage complex needs. We only need to look at the cases of NHS continuing healthcare to see that it is possible for decisions about health and social care to be made coherently and it is a credit to many of those teams that they can unpick the myriad of needs affecting patients and put together packages of care that meet the needs of the whole person and indeed the needs of those around them. It strikes me however, that it is not so much the decision-making or the ‘design’ but the implementation of those decisions and designs that is the real challenge of integrating health and social care. I wonder whether the fundamental differences in a)culture and b)training for clinicians in healthcare, as opposed to those in social care,  are such that there will never really be a genuinely integrated health and social care system. This sounds defeatist from the outset but I think it highlights just two areas (and there are many more), that need to be addressed if we are going to achieve this holy grail of a truly integrated health and social care system.

It’s worth shining the spotlight on some of the most complex cases requiring input from health and social care services. The provision of NHS continuing healthcare, by definition, applies to people with long term health and social care needs where the dominant need is deemed to be a ‘health care need’ as opposed to a ‘social care need’. So here’s the thing, what is the difference between health and social care? When does one begin and the other end?  As with many other things, it is the boundary, the borderline, the areas that are most difficult to define, where clarity is needed. It is at these professional and organisational boundaries where problems arise and where problems must be resolved in order for integration to occur.

We will consistently be returning to the questions of infrastructure and health versus care culture. It is surely a given that training will be key to any integrated system of health and social care. It is clear that joined up working can only be enhanced by joined up training. It is not entirely clear to me at present which organisations are really taking the lead in this integration of health and social care at a local level. NHS organisations and Local Authorities certainly have responsibility to design such a system but where is the guiding light? Where is the beacon that shows that people are receiving a genuinely joined up, integrated health and social care system? Is such a thing possible?

Interest Free Monthly Packages

Embrace our monthly package deals! As one of the UK's leading suppliers of elearning courses to the health & social care sector we are proud to introduce our new course catalogue & pay monthly interest free package deals. You can be assured of the highest standard of training with our CQC compliant, certificated courses. Our deals include Mandatory, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum or Alternative Packages giving you the freedom to choose the courses you require whether it’s refresher training for existing staff or training your new employees. Click here to view courses. We offer courses to meet all your mandatory and statutory training requirements, professional standards and to support best practice in the workplace. Elearning can be integrated into your current training matrix offering flexibility and reduced overhead costs.

Our course range includes: Care Certificate Caring for People with Dementia Epilepsy Awareness Health & Safety & COSHH Mental Capacity Act 2005 Safe Handling of Medicines  With our flexible and cost-effective pay monthly subscription you can pay as little as £1.80 per learner per course. To find out more call 0161 928 9987  or visit our website www.embrace-learning.co.uk

Mental Health Awareness Week

Mental Health Awareness Week 2015

Did you know that it is Mental Health Awareness Week? The theme for the week is Mindfulness - this is about learning how to pay attention to the present moment without getting stuck in the past or worrying about the future! 

We have a wide range of e-learning courses relating to mental health and disability awareness including:

 

Mental Capacity Act 2005
Caring for People with Dementia
Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards
Learning Disability Induction

Acquired Brain Injury Awareness

Supporting People with Learning Disabilities and Mental Health Needs
 

Click here for a free trial of our Mental Capacity Act 2005 course.

 

More information about Mental Health Awareness Week at www.mentalhealth.org.uk

Follow us on twitter @embracelearnuk for updates & join in with the discussion using #MHAW15