Chapter 57 – Adrian McKenna (D4SOP2)
Domain 4 Standard of Proficiency 2
Understand the need to demonstrate evidence of ongoing continuing professional development and education, be aware of professional regulation requirements and understand the benefits of continuing professional development to professional practice.
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KEY TERMS Reflection Why continuing professional development? What’s the benefit of CPD? Where do I access CPD templates? How do I identify what CPD credits I can use? Integrating CPD into practice Embracing regulation and CPD |
Social care is … about us as individuals taking opportunities to enhance the skills, knowledge and experience that we already have and to understand how we can better support ourselves and those we serve. |
When we enter into the social care field we bring with us certain skills, knowledge and experience. If we are coming directly from college, a lot of what supports us can be theory-based, as we may have limited frontline and personal experiences of care to draw upon. If we have been working in services for a long time and we are now about to enter the register as a professionally qualified social care worker, we may have extensive frontline experience, life experience and indeed may have extensive theoretical experience. Irrespective of whether you are beginning your studies in social care or have been working in the profession for many years, best practice requires continued learning through continuing professional development or CPD. The Health and Social Care Council defines CPD as ‘the means by which health and social care professionals maintain and improve their knowledge, skills and competence, and develop professional qualities required throughout their professional life’ (CORU 2013). Central to learning about your practice and professional life is a process called reflection.
Reflection
To be able to evaluate and reflect critically on your own professional practice you need to understand what reflecting or reflective practice is. Reflection, at its core, is stopping and taking a very in-depth and overarching look at any given situation. John Dewey defines reflective thinking as ‘active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends, constitutes reflective thought’ (Dewey 1933: 9). Reflecting on what we need to do to make sure that we are looking after our CPD needs can be a relatively simple process. You first need to identify the knowledge deficit in your current practice and analyse why that deficit exists; then you need to explore how this new learning would benefit your practice and those you serve; and then you need to look at the most effective way of gaining that knowledge. When you have reflected on all those areas you are ready to take part and evidence CPD.
Why CPD?
Why do we need to evidence our ongoing CPD? When you register with CORU you will be required to amass 60 CPD credits over a 24-month period. The credit system will be based on one credit for every hour you acquire ‘new learning’. In other words, if, as part of your professional development plan, you decide that you need to do TCI or MAPA or some other crisis intervention training, and all you require is a refresher that will take seven hours on one day, you would not award yourself seven CPD credits for that refresher training, you would only award yourself one credit per hour for anything new you learned; whereas if you were sent on a training course, took part in a seminar or went to a conference and it was entirely new to your learning, then you would award yourself one CPD credit per hour of that training.
TASK 1
Register at www.hseland.ie and complete the PDP e-learning module.
What’s the Benefit of CPD?
One of the great skills in understanding the role of CPD is understanding and accepting the benefits of professional development and how it supports improvements in your professional practice. It is important for us as social care professionals to have a strongly reflective, analytical and critical look at our professional development as it is used to support ourselves and those that we serve in our services. CPD is entirely about supporting the very vulnerable individuals we work with and giving them the best and safest service that we can possibly give. If we do not take the position of evidencing through a CPD journal, we are letting down ourselves, the organisation and those we serve. The whole point of the CPD journal is to analyse what training you have, to look at what training you need, to dig deep into why you feel you need that training and then to plan how that training is going to look for you. (Below this piece you will see an example of a CPD portfolio.)
When participating in the supervision process your supervisor should help you look at your developmental needs. This is where the decisions can be made on how and what you will need to do next to develop your own CPD portfolio. You must first take a historical look at your experience, your education and your skills and when you understand what you have already, only then can you develop what you need to improve. We are not just talking about theoretical knowledge but a very wide breadth of skills, personal, interpersonal, theory, concepts, real-life skills and physical skills – it’s a wide construct. When you’ve developed your PDP (personal development plan) and have looked at your continuing education as part of that, a decision can be made as to how you structure it; what are the learning activities? This is interesting because in social care everything is potentially a learning opportunity and, as mentioned above, one hour of new learning is one CPD credit.
How do I identify what CPD Credits I can use?
Ask yourself, what are your learning opportunities? Over a two-year period you will have to achieve 60 CPD credits. If you have supervision once a month over two years you probably do ten, maybe eleven, each year. If they are strong supervisions you would probably be able to give yourself half a credit for each, based on new learning, so over the 24 months you will amass 11 or 12 credits. If you do one team meeting a week, over the year you might attend 45 to 50 meetings. Again, if they are one hour long, you may get half a credit per hour, amassing 20 to 25 credits that year. If you attend conferences and are learning something entirely new to you, you award yourself one credit per hour of new learning. If you are writing something new, maybe a policy for your organisation, journal articles or blogs, and it’s new learning, you have one CPD credit for each hour of new learning. If you return to study and do a new course at third level in something in which you have no experience at all, there’s probably going to be a hundred contact hours and up to 50% of those will be new learning. This is how you try to integrate your new knowledge and skills into your CPD.
Integrating CPD into Practice
Once you’ve learned something new, you need to develop a way of using it in an experiential way, otherwise a you just lose the ability to work with it. For example, if you’re working in a service where communication for a service user is a difficulty and within that service they are using Lámh as a means of communicating and you don’t have Lámh, then you put that in your CPD plan, talk to your supervisor, get some funding to do the course. When you have completed it, you will have to weave it into your daily life skills – now it is not just a theory or a concept but a very physical space, it’s something that you need to practise, like a professional singer who needs to practise to maintain a high standard. The more practice you do, the better communicator you become and your client base will really benefit from that.
Case Study 1
When I worked in young people’s services, I was key working a young person whose relationship with his mother was completely broken down and he had little or no contact with her. I knew I would have to engage with her quite a bit. I understood that if I built up a very strong and trusting relationship with that young individual, in time I could build a trusting, caring relationship with his mother; then, reciprocally, he would see that as being a positive thing. Over the period of three years we managed to put this young man’s relationship with his mother back on a better footing. I had studied attachment theory and used some of my knowledge to support myself, the young person and his mother.
TASK 2
- How would you integrate CPD into your supervision? Discuss.
- Look at CPD opportunities over the last six months and decide how many CPD credits you would have awarded yourself.
- Using the CPD template below, how you would plan your CPD for the next year? Look at what you know, what you need to know and how you can gain that knowledge.
Embracing Regulation and CPD
Regulation of social care is imminent. As social care workers our training enables us to be reflective and flexible practitioners. In our daily work we adapt and change practice to suit the ever-changing needs of those we serve. Adhering to the regulations will require us to embrace CPD and to weave it into our daily practice. As outlined above, we are constantly learning and part of that process will be in defining what our CPD requirements are, planning and recording how we complete the 60 credits and being honest about how we identify the new learning. It is not a difficult task because it is something we are already doing.
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Example Record Templates – Adrian McKenna 2019/2020 |
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Name: |
Adrian McKenna |
CORU Registration Number: |
12345 |
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Audit period from: |
July 2019 |
Audit period to: |
July 2020 |
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Implement |
Evaluate & Reflect |
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Date and time spent When did you undertake this learning activity? |
Type of Learning Activity What was the name of the activity? |
CPD credits Approx. 1 CPD credit for every hour of new or enhanced learning achieved |
Learning Outcome What have you learnt through completing this activity? How have your skills and knowledge improved or developed? |
Impact on practice How have you integrated this learning into your practice? How has this learning made a difference to your capability and performance in your role? |
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August 2019 |
Supervisee Training |
21 credits over 4 days |
What a supervisee (can be SCW or manager) needs to bring to the supervision process, how we are influenced by our supervision history. What effective supervision looks like in a social care setting. How to work with the Kolb learning cycle and the competence matrix. Understanding what influences our learning styles allows me to find a way with my supervisor that best suits me. |
Participating in supervision is what underpins the work we do. Understanding the process and how much influence the self has is at the core of self- development. Looking at my own practice in a safe supervision relationship allows me to explore my strengths and lesser strengths. I use the learnings both as a supervisee and supervisor. |
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Implement |
Evaluate & Reflect |
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August 2019 |
HR investigation |
14 credits over 2 days |
This training has taught me the importance of defining and setting the parameters for an investigation and sticking to that, of being conscious of natural justice in the work setting and of providing a fair and equitable platform for those being investigated and those being asked to take part in the process too. |
This piece of training has reinforced for me how important boundaries are in social care settings. When conducting an investigation it is important to stick to the agreed parameters and if other related issues become apparent during an investigation that these are recorded accurately during the interview and may need to be followed up by another investigator at another time. In my current role this training has strengthened my resolve in tackling an issue that could lead to someone losing their job/career. I am confident that I can be thorough, fair and Impartial. |
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Implement |
Evaluate & Reflect |
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August 2019 |
CISM training |
14 credits over 2.5 days |
This training is international best practice in helping teams who have to respond to traumatic situations. It looked at structuring a response team and the skills required; how best to respond when a traumatic event or situation occurs; the time frame for an effective intervention; the responsibility of the organisation to the care of the workforce; and the initial defusing and moving on to the debriefing. It went on to look at how to assess the ongoing supports needed for a team in times of crisis and the supports the CISM team require themselves. |
I have taken the opportunity to use the skills learned in this training in some recent traumatic events within the service I’m based in and externally in other services. Because this training is very structured and has a strong template to follow it is easily implementable. This training requires two CISM team members to support the individual/team involved and therefore there are natural built-in supports for us as well. The CISM training has enhanced my capabilities as a frontline manager and allows me have access to a support mechanism that is ordinarily only taught to frontline emergency crews. |
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Review |
Plan |
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What do I want or need to learn in the next 12 months? |
What learning activities will I do to achieve this in the next 12 months? |
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Administration of Naloxone training |
Participation in a one-day training course with an advanced paramedic |
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Critical incident stress management (CISM) refresher training |
Participation in a one day refresher with the CISM team |
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Therapeutic crisis intervention skills (TCI) training |
Participation in a one-day refresher with a TCI instructor |
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Clinical supervision training |
Look at available training in clinical supervision at Level 9 |
Tips for Practice Educators
- Help your student to develop a PDP (personal development plan) outlining what they know and the gaps in their knowledge that can be supported during placement.
- Ask your student to draw up a CPD template and record their ‘new learning’, as identified in the PDP.
- Introduce a CPD communication session as part of your team meetings where each member of staff discusses the new learning they have received that year and gives a short presentation on the key points.
- Ask the student to give a presentation to the staff team on their new learning on placement, for example theory to practice, where they select a relevant theory and discuss how this applies to the settling and the care provided.
References
CORU (2013) Guide to Continuing Professional Development. Available at <https://socialcareireland.ie/continuing-professional-development-cpd/>.
Dewey, J. (1933) How We Think. New York: Heath & Co.
SCI (Social Care Ireland) (online) ‘What is Continuing Professional Development (CPD)?’
