Bespoke options for supported living
At Gray Healthcare we provide options for supported living with a difference. Our pioneering clinically informed approach enables us to successfully support individuals who have perhaps failed in other traditional supported living services or who may be considered too complex to successfully support in any residential setting.
What are supported living services?
Supported living services refer to specialist residential services designed to enable adults with complex needs live as independently as possible. There are many different supported living options available, ranging from larger purpose-built residential care homes to individual bespoke supported living packages.
All services provide support from trained staff, which can vary from a few hours per day right through to round the clock (24/7) support. Good supported living providers are able to provide the bespoke support that is needed by each individual, truly addressing their needs.
How our bespoke supported living options help
At Gray Healthcare, we support adults with highly complex needs who need ongoing clinical support. Most of the people we support have spent many years living in hospitals or other institutional settings, and may have a history of failed community placements with other providers.
For many, a placement with Gray Healthcare is a last attempt for a successful and permanent move out of hospital and a chance to live in the community. We can support adults who need 1:1 24/7 support right through to 3:1 24/7 support.
Matching Individual Needs
The adults we support are not best suited to living in shared accommodation settings, so all our bespoke supported living packages are provided within an individual home.
As a supported living care provider, we tailor everything about the support we provide to the specific needs of each individual. To do this, we first undertake a robust clinical assessment, involving the individual, their family and their current care team. We look at the individual’s presentation and behaviours on a day-to-day basis and explore what has happened on past placements and why they have broken down, and determine what we need to do differently to prevent this from happening again.
From this starting point, we begin to build a package of support that is tailored around each person’s needs and preferences. We recruit a team with experience of working with complex adults, and wherever possible we try and recruit individuals with shared personal interests.
Our new team receive training tailored specifically to the person they will be supporting, including two days of intensive training in PROACT-SCIPr-UK® and further training in Trauma Informed Principles.
Additionally, as part of our bespoke supported living, we incorporate ongoing clinical support from our clinical Multi-Disciplinary Team into each package of support for those individuals who require ongoing clinical support post discharge from hospital.
Finding the Right Property
Trauma-informed principles are embedded throughout our bespoke supported living services and practices. We recognise that some environments can be perpetuating, depending on the needs of the adult we’re supporting, so getting the environment right from the start is crucial.
We prefer to work with the people we support, their families and referrers to find the right property in a geographical area of choice close to family and friends. For this reason, we don’t operate in set locations and simply move people into a property where we happen to have a vacancy.
Our in-house Property Team will source the different property options for the chosen location and present these suggestions to the adult we’d be supporting, their family and the referring team. Once a property has been agreed, our Property Team will secure the property and advise on adaptations required to make the environment more suitable for the individual.
The people we support have their own individual tenancies, which removes the need for the person to move from their forever home should they no longer need our intensive level of support.
Encouraging Independence
We encourage the people we support to be as independent as possible, and we encourage them to make their own choices about how they wish to live. Like other options for supported living, we provide support with daily living skills, such as cooking, budgeting and other everyday tasks.
Where our bespoke supported living services differ is that we also provide clinical support for the people we support who have ongoing clinical needs or who have behaviours perceived to be challenging.
As an organisation, we have chosen PROACT-SCIPr-UK® as our preferred approach, as it has been proven to support positive outcomes and to reduce the need for the use of restrictive practices for people with behaviours perceived to be challenging. The benefits are twofold. By using a proactive approach, we can empower the people we support to become involved in their care by helping them learn how to appropriately handle situations they find difficult, which in turn helps them gain independence and control.
From a staff perspective, with our rigorous training programme, our staff teams learn techniques that help them develop a positive therapeutic relationship with the people they are supporting, resulting in a better working environment for all and better clinical outcomes.