Spotlight on Manor Community & how they are using Making it Real

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"It was a good quality benchmark for our area of adult social care. If more organisations use it, we can start benchmarking ourselves against each other and hopefully be able to better represent what good and outstanding care looks like from the point of view of people who access care and support".

Sophie Chester-Glyn, Managing Director at Manor Community, describes how they are using Making it Real to support the experience of people with mental health issues and learning disabilities. 

"Making it Real highlights those issues that are most important to the quality of people's lives. It helps the sector take responsibility for change and publicly share the progress being made. It’s built around I and We statements. These express what people who access care and support want to see and experience; and what they would expect to find if personalisation is really working well. Making it Real helps organisations that genuinely want to get better at personalisation to look at their current practice against the statements, identify areas for change and develop plans for action.

Why is Manor Community using Making it Real?

Manor Community supports people with mental health issues and people with learning disabilities to progress from psychiatric hospitals or high support needs, into lower more inclusive support.

Making it Real came at the ideal time for us. At the time we were asked to participate, we were in the midst of reviewing our policies and procedures and it was a great time to incorporate the ‘I’ statements, which have been co-produced with people who access services, into our systems.

It gave us a basis to work from and develop ideas within our team on co-production.

It was a good quality benchmark for our area of adult social care. If more organisations use it, we can start benchmarking ourselves against each other and hopefully be able to better represent what good and outstanding care looks like from the point of view of people who access care and support.

How we decided to do it

We decided to use TLAP’s Making it Real after extensive team brainstorms on best practice and to identify areas for change. We decided to use it:

  • as a quality measurement tool for our care plans. Matching the ‘I’ statements to areas of the care plan which focuses service managers on meeting those standards of care for individuals
  • to develop a survey on Survey Monkey using the ‘I’ statements. This allows us to measure the impact that TLAP ‘Making It Real’ has had on the people we support. This enabled us to identify the extent to which the people we support felt that those statements rung true for them.

Where the individual did not feel that the statement applied to them, i.e. we were not meeting their needs in this area, we developed an action plan with the people that we support and managers to help improve their experience. We will be putting the action plans in place over the next few months and asking those that we support to complete the questionnaire again to measure the impact of Making It Real; we’re hopeful that by then the results will have improved.

How we plan to use Making it Real in the future

We plan to incorporate Making it Real into our systems and procedures. This might include statements within our supervisions, appraisals, quality assurance and review forms with the people that we support. It may also be included in our recruitment process in terms of aligning the values and voices of those that we support as expressed through Making it Real, with how we interview and assess staff. We will be supporting our co-production sponsors to understand Making it Real and to advise on its implementation.

How we involved the people we support (co-production)

One of the people we support has accepted an invitation from us to be a ‘Making It Real and co-production champion’. He has been heavily involved in helping to test our use of incorporating the ‘I’ statements in care plans and the Survey Monkey questionnaire. He’s going to be the first person to help us test this new way of care provision from end to end. He will be writing a blog about his experiences soon, which will include the benefits and challenges he has faced".

This article originally appeared in a copy of the Skills for Care newsletter for registered managers.