Octavia care team wins London Housing with Care Workforce Development Award for end of life care
05 Jan 2024
3 min read
This #GoodNewsFriday we say well done to the Octavia care team on winning the London Housing with Care Workforce Development Award for end of life care.
In 2023 Octavia’s Care Team won a London Housing with Care Workforce Development Award for end of life care
The award recognises their work with St Christopher's CARE (St Christopher’s Centre for Awareness and Response to End of Life), in creating a toolkit for care staff to help them promote a better quality of life for people towards the end of their life.
The Better Lives, Better Endings toolkit was co-designed by Octavia and St Christopher's and uses available resources to enable care teams to be more confident with dealing with end of life care and with supporting residents to ensure their wishes and preferences are met.
It helps address challenges extra care providers face with communicating, understanding, sharing, documenting and advocating for individuals’ wishes about how they want to live their later years, in addition to death, dying and loss.
The Housing with Care Workforce Development Award recognises ‘exceptional innovation and exemplary training that encourage and inspire staff to deliver outstanding results’. Judges commended Octavia for developing a toolkit ‘which enables staff to better approach and understand end of life care. This training has empowered staff with the skills necessary to deal with this tough subject. Such training takes the stigma away from a topic that is incredibly difficult.’
The toolkit has been embedded into professional care training at Octavia for more than a year and the learnings and resource have been shared across the sector. It's available to download from the Octavia website.
Lianne Joy, Octavia Head of Care Quality said:
Colleagues fed back about experiences of supporting people as they deteriorated at end of life whilst at home and their need to be heard by professionals, as well as their own concerns around dealing with grief of losing someone they have worked with for some time. We recognised the need to empower care staff to bring about a culture change. They needed to recognise that anyone could have a key conversation, capture it, and respond sensitively. This project was about creating useful tools and an understanding of key relationships and how these can work together.
Neil McCarthy, Octavia Assistant Director of Care, Support and Communities said:
Our work with St Christopher's has not only impacted Octavia staff, residents and their families, but has also been shared nationally as a toolkit for other housing with care providers. It’s helping to rethink how we can really help shape people's experiences in the latter part of their lives. It was co-produced with our partners at St Christopher’s and the Housing LIN, and we are very grateful to them for their help and support.
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