Member Article

Tailored training delivered to improve customer experience

Staff from a North London-based specialist care provider have attended a visual awareness training course to understand and improve the services they deliver to one of their residents who is completely blind.

Seva Care Group, which provides care for people aged 18-65 with a learning disability, mental health and complex needs, identified that staff would benefit from attending the training to improve the overall experience and service delivered to residents.

The half-day visual awareness course was delivered in-house by award winning workplace training and consultancy company, HearFirst and to make the training so much more meaningful and relevant, the three-hour interactive session was delivered by a tutor who is blind himself.

The aim of the course was to provide staff with an insight into the world of blindness and partial sight. It also raises awareness of good practice in terms of accessing information, resident involvement, community understanding but also gives them the confidence of approaching, guiding and describing the environment to a blind person if required.

The delivery of the training coincides with World Sight Day - an international event held annually to raise awareness of and focus on blindness and vision impairment. This year’s event will be held this week on Thursday, October 8.

Prashna Karna, Personnel Manager at Seva Care Group, said: “Our Company is forever linked to high quality care to people and this training helped us meet our motto by fulfilling our service users need delivered by our trained staff. The training delivered by HearFirst was outstanding and very beneficial.”

Julie Ryder, Director and Founder of HearFirst, said: “Our training courses are specifically delivered by tutors who themselves have a disability and feedback from delegates and clients is always positive as they feel this adds relevance and depth to the training.

“Delivering training this way offers a safe and non-threatening environment for delegates to ask questions without feeling embarrassed or silly.

“The course we delivered for Seva Care Group was lead by Graham Helm, our blind tutor. Graham, who lost his sight in his 30’s, uses humour and real life examples to get his point across in a memorable way and this was acknowledged and very well received by the delegate evaluations.”

Training aids that are used throughout the delivery of the course and to help communicate key messages included simulation specs, liquid level indicator and the RNIB pen friend. The course was delivered for staff based in Harrow but feedback from staff suggested that they felt all staff within the company would benefit from the training.

The Visual Awareness training is a half day course and ideal for front line public services staff. For more information or to book training, please contact HearFirst on 01706 872 816 or visit www.hearfirst.org.uk

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