This role offers an exciting opportunity to advance your career as a care worker while maintaining and building relationships with your service users.
Our Community Care Champions should embody our values and demonstrate the following qualities:
- At least 1 year of experience in a care role
- A Level 2 qualification in a specialised subject (such as Dementia, End of Life Care, or Infection Control)
- Have strong communication skills
- Have confidence to act as a key contact for other staff and effectively pass on information
- Proactive and independent management to stay updated with any changes in their area of specialisation and support change in our services
Becoming a Care Champion can lead to immense job satisfaction.
You will deliver a personalised care experience for each service user, helping them lead fulfilling lives to the best of their ability.
Your expertise will enable you to effectively support service users with more complex needs.
Champions will be tasked with completing assessments for service users and exploring the available support for them and their caregivers.
More about the role:
The role of a champion in Health and Social Care is crucial. It promotes change and ensures that services continuously improve, benefiting both the service and its users.
A champion is responsible for identifying gaps and inefficiencies within the organisation.
Valuing high-quality care is essential, as champions ensure that standards are consistently met. Additionally, they must be capable of leading the necessary changes to enhance both internal and external aspects of services.
We already have dedicated teams with extensive experience in the field of care. Many staff members have years of experience in caring roles and possess a wealth of knowledge.
To use this expertise effectively, we are introducing a new role of Community Care Champions.
Each Champion will choose a specific subject to focus on, using their knowledge to support service users and their families by providing guidance, information, and advice related to their chosen topic.
Community Care Champions will gather the latest information in their specialised areas to share with the rest of the team and act as role models for their colleagues by demonstrating best practices in delivering high-quality care.
We will have Champions specialising in various areas, including Dementia, End-of-Life Care, Diabetes, Nutrition and Hydration, Falls, and Infection Control.
Our Champions will help to identify areas for improvement and lead change to improve our services.
Over the next few months, we will introduce you to our Champions and provide more information about their roles and how they will support their teams.
Benefits of Care Champions…
Gaining an outstanding rating, is just one of many benefits that appointing champions can lead to. In fact, the benefits of having change champions are wide-ranging and can include:
- A higher quality of care for your patients or service users. If there are appointed people who will specifically look into the care you offer, consider ways to improve it, and put these improvements into place, then this will ensure you are offering care that is always of the highest quality. This will improve the quality of life for those in receipt of care, and in turn make you a much better care establishment.
- Up-to-date policies and procedures. One of the main benefits of appointing change champions is that you can assign a champion to any aspect of your work environment, and appoint new champions whenever you identify something else that needs improvement. By having different champions to look at different aspects of your work environment, it helps to ensure that your policies and ways of working remain up-to-date and focussed.
- Improved ratings. We briefly touched on this above with the case study, but by having champions in place who are continually looking at ways of improving your services and establishment, it can help to improve your rating from the CQC as you will be demonstrating that you are committed to continuously improving your care.
- Increased staff knowledge. If you have members of staff who have learnt about alternative ways of working as part of their champion role, or have learnt a lot more about their own role, then this will increase the amount of knowledge they have for their work. Additionally, they can share this knowledge with other staff members so that everyone can benefit from greater knowledge and understanding.
- Greater staff morale. If staff feel like they’re continuously learning, this will help them to feel more fulfilled and will increase their morale. Additionally, appointing staff members as champions means greater opportunity for personal development for those staff members, which will in turn keep them more motivated and help with their skillset.
- A better workplace environment. By appointing champions who can look at improving your service, you are showing that you are committed to providing the best possible care that you can. This is likely to increase both patient confidence as well as staff confidence: you will show staff that they work somewhere that really cares about its patients.
