Together, building a better future
Autism
Specialist support for people with autism
Introducing the Care Solutions Group’s autism services
At the Care Solutions Group, our goal is to make a positive difference in the lives of every person we support.
We understand that people with Autistic Spectrum Conditions (ASC) may have needs and choices that challenge traditional, less flexible forms of service provision. We also understand that autism affects each person differently and the complexity of the condition makes a person-centred approach essential.
To deliver the highest quality residential and supported living services and enable the most positive individual outcomes, we work closely with the individual and their families to listen to their wishes for how they want to live their lives.
Our creative approach includes using whatever communication methods and strategies the person finds helpful to ensure we understand their values and what makes them unique as an indi vidual. We engage with the person and their family and other people who are important in their lives to ensure we can see the real essence of their personality, their views and what is important to them.
Training, staff support and resource allocation are key to delivering and developing our ever-improving specialist autism services, and we ensure all staff receive specific training in ASC as p art of their induction. Ongoing, person-centred, individual ASC training and coaching is provided by our Autism Lead.
We have invested in employing specialists into our team to help build and develop our skills and knowledge, and to work with families, local and national groups and bring new ideas, and approaches into our service provision.
Our Autism Team
Our commitment to developing our autism services within residential and supported living is reflected in our appointment of Sarah Calvert as Autism Lead at the Care Solutions Group.
In this role, she is responsible for developing our services for people with ASC, contributing experience and knowledge gained in developing specialist services within the NHS and the social care sector.
After qualifying as a learning disability nurse, Sarah became a community nurse, largely working with people with autism and their families. She was then appointed to a clinical nurse manager post, managing specialist residential NHS services for people with autism, together with forensic assessment and treatment services and community nursing teams. During this time, Sarah was formally recognised within the NHS for her pioneering work in service transformation.
In 2000, Sarah joined the National Autistic Society, where she worked until 2007 as area manager for East Anglia. Here she further developed her knowledge and skills in the issues that people with ASC and those who support them face in everyday life. She also led a major person-centred leadership initiative, designed to ensure excellent outcomes for people with ASC and their families.
Across the Care Solutions Group, our team benefits from Sarah’s experience and knowledge. This includes assisting and training others to understand clinical aspects of ASC and how to support these. Through her experience Sarah has a good understanding of the lifelong implications of ASC for individuals, their families and friends. Her advocacy of a person-centred approach is supported by her extensive theoretical knowledge.
Sarah is qualified in Person-Centred Leadership, Approaches and Planning, is a qualified counsellor and has gained the NVQ 5 Management Award.
She is supported by local autism champions in each service. These members of staff provide the direct day-to-day support that people with autism receive and lead on ensuring positive autism practice locally. They work with Sarah to ensure that autism-specific assessments and behaviour support plans are developed and delivered, and have a key role in developing knowledge and skills within staff teams. We have developed a robust infrastructure that ensures our approach is outcome-focused for the people we support and the autism team meets regularly in the forums of the Autism Accreditation Action Group and the Autism Action Learning Set. Individual members of the autism team have specific areas of interest and expertise so that skills are shared and developed. Four of our residential homes are registered with Autism Accreditation (NAS).
Our approach
Our approach has been developed specifically to support the unique needs and choices of individuals with autism and is underpinned by our policy, practice and procedures.
In delivering our individualised, positive support, we believe in keeping things simple, effective and person-centred. We also adopt nationally recognised models of good practice, for example the SPELL approach developed by the National Autistic Society.
- Structure: ensuring we uphold and respect the individual’s structure and understand the individual’s need for their routines to happen in a certain way.
- Positive approaches: having a solution focused approach. Seeing the positive things about the person and celebrating and valuing each person for who they are.
- Empathy: putting ourselves in our SERVICE USERS’ shoes, understanding how they see the world and working with them from their perspective.
- Low arousal: Being aware that the people we support may have difficulties with coping in different environments due to sensory processing. We understand the need for the people we support to feel secure and relaxed and therefore we work to alleviate any anxieties that different environments might raise.
- Links: supporting links with family and community, and other people or networks that are important in a person’s life. We respect that we all need to have relationships and links and seek to enable and support these for the people we support.ve relationships and links and seek to enable and support these for the people we support.
Our support
The complexity of ASC makes it unwise and counter-productive to generalise or make assumptions about how someone with autism will change and develop over time and an approach that works well with one person may not be right for another.
In designing and implementing our programme of support, we always place the individual at its heart. We also draw on the experience and knowledge of families, friends, and others who may be significant in a person’s life. We work in collaboration with NHS and social care professionals to ensure that the people we support have full access to the best advice and direction.
By looking at the whole picture, we are able to support people with autism in ways that can make a significant difference to their independence, quality and enjoyment of life and future outcomes.
The right environment…
We ensure the individual’s living environment – whether residential or supported living – is designed to meet their needs and reflects their choices, for example of colour and furnishings. We carry out a sensory processing assessment with each individual, and this is key to ensuring that their home and support are tailored to their personal needs and wishes.
Enabling the individual to feel safe and comfortable in an environment that meets their expectations supports us in our work to help them develop and to achieve positive outcomes.
Communication strategies…
We provide a wide range of communication methods and strategies. Our Total Communication Strategy values all behaviour as a form of communication and supports the use of alternative and augmentative communication methods, to embrace all the ways individuals express themselves.
We work closely with specialist speech and language therapy departments, to support each individual’s communication needs and develop appropriate communication techniques. These include visual communications, signing, the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS), TEACCH and Makaton. Whichever tool, or tools, is used, the strategy is chosen by the individual and enabled by the team.
Social skills support…
We encourage confidence building and community involvement – whether within the small community of housemates or co-tenants or in the wider community. We slowly and supportively push back boundaries to enable individuals to enjoy the meaningful and positive interaction with their community that helps to build self-esteem and well-being. Many of the people we support have developed really positive groups of peers, and while we understand this can present people with ASC with difficult issues, we have managed to support people to make and maintain enjoyable and meaningful relationships with others and as such feel valued and welcomed.
Positive behaviour support…
We see all behaviours as communication and work with each individual, their key worker (residential settings) or personal assistant (supported living) and their families to identify the function of the behaviour. Each individual we support has a Behaviour Support Plan that identifies these functions and sets out proactive and reactive strategies to support the individual.
We work to develop strategies for the individual to communicate in ways that provide clarity and results. We also identify respectful, appropriate ways to promote positive behaviour as a tool to help us better understand the messages people are giving us. All our behaviour support processes are approved by the British Institute of Learning Disabilities (BILD).
Sensory processing…
Communication and coping strategies play a large part in sensory processing. Plans are developed alongside our sensory support and multi-sensory Snoezelen environments, not only to enable relaxation but to help manage hyper-sensory and hypo-sensory processing and expression.
As it becomes clearer that sensory processing can have a huge impact on some individuals with ASC, we work closely with healthcare colleagues to minimise negative experiences for people who may have difficulties with sensory integration.
