[Sandra Lomax]

We deliver a one day training course entitled "Delivering Enabling Support Services" which helps support staff to review their own working practices and develop enabling support skills.

Supporting People is all about helping people to "do for themselves" and yet our experience is that many organisations still have a "do for" culture which is actively promoted by managers who themselves do not fully understand what it means in practice to deliver enabling support services.

For example in one organisation, the support worker had the role of taking a Friday night fish and chip order from everyone, going and getting them and delivering them to each persons door. When the staff member was off work, they didnt get their chips! This was advertised this as part of the support service available.

A co-worker in the same organisation, at a different project, had arranged a Chip Van to call at the project every Friday so that they could get their own chips and for those who found it difficult to leave the home, other tenants helped out and turned it into a social occasion with several people all having their fish and chip supper together, they really looked forward to Friday nights!

I think differences to the approach of delivering support are magnified when we look at the other organisations both in and out of that area.

Customers appear to be getting a really different level of service, and some organisations are still actively promoting dependence rather than independence, though are often not aware of the extent of this until they attend our training day.

Delivering enabling support empowers both the customers and the staff teams.

One of the areas we explore on the training day is that "everything you DO for the customer, denies them an opportunity to DO it for themselves"

Do you have experience of enabling and disabling support practices?
What are the expectations placed on you in your service?
What are the customer expectations of you in the service?

I am really keen to hear your views on this.