Partners for Inclusion wins Prestigious Scottish Training Award

Ayrshire-based social care providers “Partners for Inclusion” have walked off with a Scottish training and development award at the National Training Awards 2005. In a ceremony held in Glasgow’s Radisson SAS Hotel earlier this month presented by television personality Jenni Falconer, the innovative social care providers were judged to be “outstanding in Scotland” for their development of a unique training programme that has inspired and motivated learners and perhaps more crucially, is helping to transform the lives of the individuals making use of the provider’s services. Partners for Inclusion’s Director Doreen Kelly, expressing delight on picking up the award stated “We are delighted to receive an award for ground-breaking training. The Higher Education Certificate is a course of the future and will equip staff to provide the highest quality of support to people who experience mental health or learning difficulties”.

Frustrated by the lack of comprehensive training incorporating modern approaches in social care, Partners for Inclusion, along with several like-minded service providers nationwide, set about developing an integrated approach to training which has ultimately led to the development of a new Higher Education Certificate (HEC) course in Person Centred Approaches for Social Care Workers at Queen Margaret University College in Edinburgh. Demand for places on this new course has been extremely high since its inception, validating Partners for Inclusion’s long-held belief that the social care sector in Scotland was ready to embrace more creative and innovative approaches in their service designs.

Having previously been part of a sister company from it’s inception in 2000 Partners for Inclusion became an independent company and registered charity in 2004. During its short but already impressive history, Partners for Inclusion has gained an enviable reputation within the sector as a provider with a uniquely successful approach to care provision, with one 2004 independent evaluation appraising the company “an excellent example of an organisation offering individually tailored support. It is visionary, knowledgeable and thoughtful, unique of its kind”.

At the heart of Partners for Inclusion’s remarkable success is its central commitment to Person Centred Planning, a fundamentally different way of seeing and working with people with disabilities. The central tenet of person centred care provision is to discover and act upon what is important to that person, to discover their aspirations and look upon ways that these can be achieved. The eventual service will be flexible and under constant review in order to change with the changing needs of the person. Also important is that all views, from all the important people in an individual’s life are listened to and respected. Consulting amongst family and friends of the person with as much attention as one would listen to a professional, helps ease the transition to wider community life, an ordinary life, and most importantly, a real life.

With all of this success you’d be forgiven for thinking that Partners for Inclusion would be looking to expand far beyond its current size, but nothing could be further from the truth. The company intends to stay small, local and focussed in its provision of services allowing themselves to concentrate fully on the individuals they support rather than the running and management of a larger organisation. Rather than compromise the quality of their service provision with a one-size-fits all approach, Partners for Inclusion currently support 45 people with 45 individually tailored and very different services. Deputy Director June Jeffrey explains “It’s an approach that is essential to ensure that our services remain person centred as opposed to organisation led. . This has served us well so far and we hope it will continue to do in the future”.