Kensington and Chelsea Home Treatment Team lead education initiative to improve team skills and expertise.
Senior staff and team members identified a lack of confidence in certain key areas of their work during their regular supervision sessions, team meetings, and handovers.
They discovered that there were several barriers hindering their professional development. This included: minimal engagement in continuous professional development, limited coverage of relevant subjects in staff induction and mandatory training, busy clinical work with no protected teaching time, and no ongoing teaching programme within the team.
In order to address these areas, they developed a programme to build up the team’s skillset and improve the standard of patient care through a 'bitesize' teaching programme. The initiative considered the needs of patients and involved service user representatives from the start. The team worked to improve the quality of patient care by building confidence levels of the team members – specifically, around knowledge and skills when delivering care for patients with serious mental illness (SMI).
The team addressed knowledge gaps through concise teaching sessions and promoted a culture of continuous learning and improvement. The success of the project was measured through a questionnaire (using a scale that measures opinions, attitudes or behaviours) which assessed the change in reported confidence levels before and after training.