Training

We actively support our staff to develop themselves both personally and professionally by offering a comprehensive range of in-house training courses. These not only cover all mandatory training requirements in the care sector, but they also offer ‘above & beyond’ training to ensure our staff have the knowledge and understanding to provide excellent support for our residents.
Typical courses on offer through our rolling programme are:

Induction Health & Safety
Covering all mandatory areas required by local authorities and CQC, this training looks into legal and organisational responsibilities, infection control, food hygiene and fire safety.
Moving People
Ensuring that staff understand how to move residents safely within legal guidelines, assessing risk and identifying poor practice.
Food Hygiene
Looking into the prevention of cross-contamination, correct food labelling, nutrition, legal frameworks and menu planning. Fire Safety – ensuring staff understand legal obligations relating to fire safety, the use of fire extinguishers and Ashmere’s local; policies and procedures.
Basic 1st Aid
Basic life support; looking into typical emergency situation, actions and reactions when working with our client group, recovery position and CPR.
Safeguarding & MCA
Exploring Ashmere’s policies and procedures around safeguarding adults and children , what constitutes abuse, signs and symptoms to be aware of, prevention of safeguarding concerns, effective reporting and recording of concerns and incidents, whistleblowing, developing an understanding of the MCA, DoLS and how MCA assessments and best interest decisions are made.

Further training on offer includes

Effective Communication
A short session looking into how we communicate, barriers to effective communication, effective listening skills and what we can do to aid communication. Also looking into typical communication issues experienced by our client group and ways we can work to effectively support the residents in our care through a range of different communication methods, environmental adaptations and changing our everyday approaches.
Customer Services
Developing our staff by exploring what makes good customer service; effective telephone and note-taking skills, the use of positive body language and eye contact in customer facing roles, how to deal with residency requests and visits, planning conversations, environmental focus and key skills when dealing with ‘tricky’ situations.
Care Planning
Exploring care plan writing, developing more effective care plan reviewing skills, working with innovative new systems, assessing mental capacity, and developing staff’s understanding of evolving care plans and working on maintaining person-centredness.
Meaningful Activities
A training session looking into developing everyday activities for all of our residents. Whatever ability or health need a resident has we work together to develop comprehensive activity plans to ensure all activities and stimulation are appropriate to each resident. This training session focuses on activities of daily living and how we can investigate life histories to determine household and other activities that will ensure residents feel valued and purposeful.
Dementia Care
Training around specialist dementia care is ongoing at Ashmere. All training sessions are linked with dementia care but this session particularly explores how we can adapt and gear the environment to the needs of people living with dementia as well as looking into behaviours care staff may encounter and how these relate to the experiences of people living with dementia. To compliment this training we also run a ten-module development programme to ensure our Dementia Support Workers have more in-depth knowledge and understanding of the condition which, in turn ensures that our residents are provided with the best, person-centred care possible for their needs.
End Of Life Care
Sensitively approaching the subject of end of life care and bereavement, this training ensures that staff have the care, compassion, consideration and sensitivity to ease the journey for residents at end of life. This training looks at facilitating future wishes for residents, how we meet medical and social needs and how we can effectively support residents’ loved ones during this potentially difficult time. It also looks at holding such difficult conversations and, following a death, how we can adapt our practice and responses to help staff to deal with bereavement.

Our comprehensive Induction Programme and 10 module Dementia Training Programme are also CPD accredited.
To further develop our staff we encourage and facilitate staff to enrol onto Apprenticeships, Diplomas, NVQs and other specialist external training courses.