Celebrating Excellence

Ambient Support is one of the Top-20, not-for-profit, social care providers in the UK. It’s the mission of all of us at Ambient to provide a person-centred approach that enables the people we support to live full and meaningful lives. To achieve this, the charity understood that establishing a group representative of the people supported by us is key to aid understanding of what good-quality care looks like.

In 2020, I joined Ambient as newly appointed Head of Quality and began the process of championing a new initiative to create and develop this body of people who could work in partnership with Ambient’s Quality Group and put the voice of the people supported at the heart of all Ambient does.

Thankfully, it was not difficult getting buy-in from the Executive Team for this initiative and there had already been some great examples of involvement in the charity over the years. However, extra time and resources had to be allocated to work toward cementing the principles of involvement and co-production across more areas of the operation.

Experts by experience

Working alongside Joanne Tuberville, who joined the Quality Team as a dedicated Involvement and Co-production Lead, we soon established the principles for the initiative and the self-named experts with lived experience; ‘The Ambient Guardians’ were formed.

The Guardians meet monthly working to ensure that the services we provide at Ambient Support are the best that they can be and are enabling people to live fulfilling lives. Group members are ambassadors for other people supported by Ambient; by giving them a voice and ensuring they are heard.

It requires a mutually respective relationship between people supported and professionals to shift change in decision making and this has been imperative to its success. The input of The Guardians has been integral to informing and developing the charity’s Quality Strategy.

Group members champion involvement and help plan, review and audit services, and explore staff recruitment and training. Their feedback supports improvement and informs everyone’s understanding of what good-quality care looks like.

The Ambient Guardians really do help inspire Ambient and our staff teams to keep striving to provide robust, rights-focused, personalised care from the view of people themselves.

Collaborative working

From the outset, the group took ownership of its identity by helping to create a distinct brand logo, which has helped bond the group and given them an incredible sense of pride in how and what they contribute. Group members have also had the opportunity to develop their own vocational skills as part of their involvement.

Coming together

The Guardians were set up just before the pandemic, which meant working innovatively to overcome the challenges that the pandemic created. This involved bringing people together safely from different communities, with additional support needs, who were unable to physically meet. Creative and innovative thinking was required, for example, people were offered additional technical equipment and consulted on which equipment and platforms might be best to enable them to take part.

Whilst initially feeling like a barrier to relationship building, with additional help from support staff and accessible resources, such as easy read guidance and specialist training, that sense of place and ownership soon developed. It meant that people were able to unite despite their differing disabilities and their geographic distance from one another.

Making a difference

Despite all the adversity at the outset, Joanne, The Guardians, and the team supporting them were all committed to making a difference and having a positive impact. Taking part really helped with people’s moods and wellbeing at a time when everyone was physically and socially isolated and when normal life was suspended. Despite all the challenges of trying to cater for people’s diverse needs during a global pandemic and the introduction of new technology to enable virtual meetings to take place, the members built up firm relationships and this allowed for lots of rich cross learning that we may not have achieved otherwise.

This rich cross learning has led to The Guardians’ involvement in achieving real and tangible impacts on the way in which Ambient operates. Not only have they designed and delivered workshops attended by Ambient staff on Quality Checker training, but they have played an active role in interview panels for Trustees and Senior Leaders at Ambient; designed new easy read resources and interview packs; secured funding to train 10 new Quality Checkers in the Midlands; and created an Involvement Passport. Working alongside their support worker for its completion, the Involvement Passport enables the Ambient team to offer tailored support that nurtures involvement for the individual and ensures that their contribution is meaningful and fulfilling to them.

In such a short space of time The Guardians have achieved so much. They have made contributions that have meant we have adapted our support tools and adapted how Ambient supports and rewards people for their time. Additionally, they have worked with others to gather compelling evidence and insights from the people we support to improve the quality of care that we deliver.

Creating opportunities

Success has brought about a plethora of opportunities for the work, knowledge and experience that The Guardians are now able to share with others. The group is presenting at a Voluntary Organisation Disability Group (VODG) Forum in late autumn, is scheduled to sit on the panel at the National Care Forum’s (NCF) CEO’s conference and is working with Learning Disability England (LDE) to host a webinar in December 2022 around the involvement of people with a learning disability in the recruitment process.

We are incredibly proud of all that The Guardians have achieved thus far, not least winning this Award for Innovation and Quality Outcomes. However, their work is far from done. More recently, Joanne and The Guardians have agreed and developed a new group who have self-titled themselves ‘The Adventurers’. This group is made up of Guardians who are available to focus on specific tasks – agreed during The Guardians’ meetings. They look at a subject matter in more intensive detail, and explore and unpick the issues involved before taking their thoughts and recommendations through to The Guardians for comment, involvement or further exploration.

In addition, we are looking to expand upon Joanne’s role using her expertise to further embed the co-production and involvement principles into all our operational environments. We aim to have local involvement experts in each region in which we operate, who will help to deliver localised programmes and act as a point of reference for regional staff teams.

As the work of The Guardians and Adventurers continues, members have told us they really value the opportunity to develop or refresh their vocational skills. For example, two of The Guardians were recently supported by Joanne to deliver a training package they had designed to a group of Ambient staff in our mental health services. Joanne is working with our Learning and Development Team to identify further opportunities for this expert by experience training.

The further expansion and ongoing development of our involvement and co-production work is incredibly exciting. I am delighted with our success so far; with the commitment and dedication of Joanne and all of the team, the sky’s the limit on what we can achieve in the future.