Prevention through education for care services

Caroline Bartle FRSA founded a social enterprise specialising in training and education in the social care sector, developing resources to promote human rights, encourage inclusivity and challenge oppression. ‘Prevention Through Education’ is their crowdfunding campaign aiming to raise £5,000 by Friday 25 October 2019.

To support Prevention through Education visit their Kickstarter page here.

Our social care services flex and bend under the weight of increasing care demands. More people need care and their care needs are more complex. People need to think on their feet, learn to adapt and work in ways that can impact powerfully on people’s lives. Our social care services are over stretched and mostly underpaid. Increased challenges in workforce development has meant that technology is being used in creative ways to stimulate learning and conversations in busy environments.

We are a social enterprise and we have been self-funding the development of educational resources which we share freely to organisations to start conversations about important topics. Funding training can be difficult and care services are often focusing on just having enough people to do the job. The environments are busy and the job is demanding and complex yet requires a great set of skills.

Our learning resources are designed to work in busy environments, to shape learning in bite size pieces, that can be easily shared. The aims of our resources are to encourage people to think differently and to develop the skills to provide care and support that is empowering, proactive, connected, and compassionate. We aim to change hearts and minds and to tackle ignorance and discrimination by engaging people through visually eye-catching resources.

Developing and funding these resources is not always easy. Neither is getting people to willingly collaborate for the common good. Itis costly, and it takes staunch commitment and vision sometimes to keep walking up, what seems to be, a very steep hill. Lack of public funding, a highly competitive industry, and a general lack of trust and a sense of togetherness can put obstacles in the way of developing good quality learning resources.

We need to work creatively and collaborate broadly to tackle some of these challenges. One of the ways that we do this is by sharing to create. In the development of our resources we collaborate broadly. We consider our role as a catalyst as we aim to bring practical solutions to diverse work settings. To date we have produced over 100 different resources which are shared around the world across social media. Some of the topics have included:

• Safeguarding
• Dementia
• Culture of care
• Learning Disabilities
• Mental health
• LGBTQi
• Person centred planning

However, our work is not done yet! We need your help to continue to make a difference. When designing our resources, we aim to promote human rights, encourage inclusivity and challenge oppression. We are delighted to learn that our resources are now not only used by the social care sector but also by individuals wanting to make more informed decisions about their own lives.

Our resources make a difference in people’s lives. We have had an amazing response to our resources. Here are some of the things that people have said: 

I am a care home manager. It has not only aided me in supporting the individuals within the home but also my staff team in giving them guidance and support. My team also benefits from them individually and as a group in improving understanding and the quality of care they deliver

They are easy to read & understand and when shown to members of the public (not involved in the care industry) the message is easily relayed

I deliver dementia awareness training in my trust and find they have a positive impact in training as they are so visual

Each of our resources cost over £200 to create which we have funded independently over the years. We would like to crowd source a further £5,000 so that we can make a further 25 on the following topics:

• Older people and autism
• Mental health and learning disability
• Diabetes
• Risk reduction in dementia
• Strength based approaches to support
• Mental Capacity and Liberty Protection Safeguards
• LGBTQIA+
• Links between physical and mental wellbeing

If you have used our resources in the past and found them useful, please contribute to our project so that we can continue doing what we do. These resources will be made freely available at the end of the project to anyone who would like to access them. They can be shared easily across social media and contain lots of embedded links to further information.

To support Prevention through Education visit their Kickstarter page here. Their campaign is live until Friday 25 October 2019.