At CLIA Care, each person’s journey is important to us. We strive to work with individuals to find out or help them build their vision, their aspirations for the future.
We want people to make their own decisions and control their own lives.
It is our aim to help people build genuine independence, for example, the key skill of being able to travel independently. We try and make our support as personalised as possible, and we create an environment where having opportunities available to everyone else becomes a normal thing for someone with support needs.
Because we are a relatively small organisation (currently with four services), we have been able to foster a professional yet informal environment that in turn allows our staff and our service users to interact as a small community and to do so naturally. Staff bring aspects of their lives into the support environment, for example, things based around their interests. Yoga and health sessions on-site for example, or a service user coming out to stables to spend time with the horses with another staff member and their family who are going to the venue for horse riding. Another example is of a young male staff member who often goes to the beach on the weekend with his friends. After a bit of planning, he replicated this type of excursion with some young male service users.
We work closely with other agencies that may be providing an element of support in the person’s life. For example, we work closely with health professionals, including mental health services. We also support people that may have come into contact with the criminal justice system, guiding them through processes there and in partnership with key agencies, supporting the person toward more productive outcomes. We also work with ‘Leaving Care’ teams where they may be involved.
We believe that behaviours that may challenge are a form of communication. Using our own experience and following advice from specialist professionals, we guide, we listen, and we try to understand. Our aim is to get to the heart of why someone is behaving the way they are. We communicate with them using a medium meaningful to the individual, Makaton, PECS, BSL, verbal cues, non verbal cues, and just talking to people. We build rapport and relationships with everyone. We aim to empower and advocate so that people feel stable and confident.
When we support people with learning disabilities who may have built up unhealthy lifestyle patterns in the past, our first port of call is to build trust so that people see us as an ally. We encourage and compliment positive progress and we try and guide people away from the wrong company or routines that may prove damaging, to move to a healthy and fulfilling lifestyle.
