The British Institute of Human Rights (BIHR) is excited to be on our second year of working together with NCF member Royal Star and Garter care homes to deliver comprehensive equality and human rights training for all care home staff.
Royal Star and Garter provides care for veterans and their partners who live with disability or dementia. They originally commissioned BIHR towards the end of 2018 with the aim of building the capacity of staff to work with a human rights approach and to meet their legal duties under the Human Rights Act.
You can read more about why human rights are important in the Care and Support Sector here.
What is a human rights approach?
BIHR supports organisations to embed a human rights based approach. This means empowering the individual in receipt of a service to know and claim their rights and increasing the ability and accountability of those responsible for protecting and fulfilling those rights.
Adopting a human rights approach is not about creating an extra workload or rewriting every policy, but rather it is about putting the person at the heart of what you do and applying human rights standards and values into your practice.
What does the training involve?
At BIHR we aim for the light bulb moments – when people make the connection between human rights and the work they do every day. We move human rights from the law books to everyday life, using real examples and a practical human rights based approach.
Organisations work better when they use a human rights based approach, staff have an effective decision making framework and those that use the service are empowered to know and use their rights.
We worked with Royal Star and Garter to create a bespoke training package that was appropriate for their care home staff. The first training session covered:
- An introduction to human rights and the Human Rights Act
- An introduction to the Equality Act
- Some key human rights relevant to residential care
- Using human rights and equalities in practice
We are now in our second year of training. This session builds on learning from last year by providing a refresher on previous content, exploring key human rights in more depth as well as introducing other human rights. It has been fantastic to revisit human rights with staff and to hear about how they have been incorporating their knowledge in to their work.
This is what staff have told us about our training:
How can I organise training for my staff?
BIHR offer tailormade training to suit the needs of your particular staff and setting. Using our expertise and practical knowledge, we work with you to develop a bespoke human rights training package that uses real day to day examples on areas which staff find difficult to navigate. This might be the balancing of family member’s rights with individuals; making difficult decisions around capacity or how to involve people equally. Helping your organisation respect and protect human rights, a legal duty which is set out in the Human Rights Act.
For queries about human rights training please contact Carlyn Miller, Policy and Programmes Manager: Cmiller@bihr.org.uk
On 4 March we are offering an open training course for Health and Social Care Providers which offers a practical framework; building the knowledge and confidence of practitioners and planners to use human rights day to day to improve services. Follow this link to book your place, NCF members can use the code – NCF10OFF at checkout to get 10% off. We hope to see you there!
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