Be.INSPIRED for Direct Service Provision
This training has been specifically built for people providing direct service provision.
Support Work is an amazing job, it can be so fulfilling, you can feel a range of different emotions and no one day is the same. But as a Support Worker, you have a really important role to play to ensure the people you support are living the life they choose, living it their way and that you are only ever being someone’s microphone, not their voice.
A Support worker must always maintain professional boundaries and respect the boundaries of the people they serve, and often this can be challenging to navigate.
Be.INSPIRED will help you feel more confident in your role, understand your purpose, how to create and maintain boundaries and helping you use a trauma informed approach, that is person centred and human right oriented.
Inclusive – what makes your service provision inclusive? Learn some simple ways to bring inclusion into your service delivery.
Nourishing – What have you done to make someone’s day/week better? You will learn all about using a Trauma informed approach with a human and empathetic response and gain an understanding of how trauma affects a person’s life.
Safe – How do you make people feel safe when you are supporting them? What does ‘safe’ mean to the people you serve?
Safe has different meaning to people. When I asked some people I work alongside with what safe means to them in regard to service provision, here are some of their examples:
- Knowing that I won’t be killed
- Knowing that my information is safe and private
- Knowing that I don’t have to tell my story over and over again
- Knowing that my support worker knows what is important to me and how I like to be supported
- Knowing that I can say no or end a service without feeling pressured to stay or threatened
- Knowing that people will give me notice before arriving
- Knowing people will knock and wait for my permission to enter my house or room
- Knowing that I’ll be informed if a new worker is starting and that they will be adequately trained in how best to support me.
Person Centred – foundational skills (active listening/paraphrasing etc). who is making the decisions? What does Person centred actually mean? Active listening is a key component in any proactive and positive support, and just a great skill to have for every day use! Active listening means to actually really listen. Not planning what you are going to say while the other person is still speaking. It means actually hearing what the person has said, so much so, that you can paraphrase that back to them. For example, Thanks for sharing that with me Tony. You have told me that you are unhappy with the services that we have provided to you, because we have been late or not shown up on several occasions, and have not communicated with you about this.
Informed – Are the participants informed about their service provision and any changes?
Respectful – You will learn about unconscious bias and begin thinking about how to identify, acknowledge and work through these. Learn about removing your own values and judgements from a situation. /how do you resolve conflict/ own values and judgements.
Educated – Be.INSPIRED is here to educate you, an opportunity for you to participate in professional development/ do you receive supervision or mentoring. But also, it will begin you thinking about how you receive education about your role in general and the individual role you have with each participant.
Decrease Risk – what do you and your service do to ensure you aren’t placing the people you serve at risk of abuse? You will gain an understanding the requirements of you as a support worker and the role you play in decreasing the risk of abuse of people living with disability.
