Member Article

Disability training improves staff awareness

Staff from Yorkshire-based housing provider, Incommunities, have benefitted from a series of disability awareness training sessions, which will help support them to deliver a more inclusive and accessible service to customers.

Participants included frontline staff and employees from their support services. They learnt more information on areas such as deaf awareness, visual awareness, mental health, British Sign Language (BSL), understanding learning difficulties and disability etiquette.

The one-hour bite sized training sessions were delivered by tutors from award winning workplace training and consultancy company HearFirst who themselves have disabilities.

The sessions were delivered over two days in March and June and provided the opportunity for up to 300 members of staff to attend. Due to the success of these sessions, another day has already been booked in September for other members of staff wishing to attend the training.

Barbara Hill, Learning and Development Officer at Incommunities, said: “I attended two of the sessions and found them to be really informative.

“The training was very well delivered by both tutors and they ensured that everybody got involved. The whole group interacted well and I am sure that all staff have benefitted from these sessions both on a professional and personal level.”

Lorraine Clarke, Sheltered Scheme Co-ordinator at Farish House in Keighley, who also attended the training, said: “I found the sessions to be very informative and useful. I thought the British Sign Language course was very good and it has helped me to improve my communication with one of our profoundly deaf residents.

“The disability etiquette training really opened my mind and I learnt things which I didn’t know beforehand.”

Sue Laycock, Director of HR at Incommunities, said: “As an organisation we are committed to taking a proactive approach to promoting equality and diversity both within the workforce and in delivering our customer services.”

“These sessions, delivered by HearFirst, have proved an ideal opportunity for staff to get engaged and learn more about a range of disability issues. The feedback from those staff attending has been very positive.”

Julie Ryder, Director and Founder of HearFirst, said: “We were invited by Incommunities to deliver a range of topics to members of staff that would provide them a brief overview of each area plus enough to be able to take away with them and implement within the workplace.

“Our one-hour bite sized training sessions are ideal for organisations who want to limit the amount of time a participant is away from their job role but have enough impact to be able to make a difference. Participants were able to choose the areas they felt they needed more learning on so their time is used more efficiently.

“We used two training rooms per day to deliver sessions simultaneously, which gave us the opportunity to deliver a total of 10 sessions per day. We tailored the training specifically to their needs.”

Incommunities is one of the largest social housing providers in the UK. The organisation owns and manages 21,500 homes for rent including almost 1,000 properties for leasehold. The organisation has a dedicated, diverse and multi-skilled workforce of over 1,250 staff.

HearFirst provides a full range of equality and diversity training courses to organisations across the UK. For more information on deaf, disability awareness and BSL training, please contact Julie at HearFirst on 01706 872 816 or visit www.hearfirst.org.uk

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by HearFirst .