Champions of Redcroft…

During a house recent house meeting there was a fantastic discussion on developing our ‘Champion’ roles within our service.

What is a Champion?

Our Champions encourage team members and residents to develop their knowledge and practical skills in a variety of key areas.  By being a learning ‘bridge’ between research, best practice, and knowledge, and others at Redcroft, Champions do the hard work and source the information to share.

 They make learning fun.  They challenge poor and habitual ways of doing things and offer an alternative and often fun means of carrying out the task or offer something entirely new to try.

A Champion is inclusive and supportive in how they share ideas and practice.

Our Champions are the individuals who live at Redcroft as well as our own team members.

Sharron Eyears, registered manager, says: “At the meeting we were excited to be extending this [Champion role] to include any individual who wanted to be involved, encouraging them to do research, to maybe design and make a game to make the learning fun and to support educational presentations at house meetings. This has gone down a storm, promotes ownership of the individuals’ home and how it is run, along with generating a lot of laughter!

With team members and residents sharing Champion roles, there is real inclusion and this is evidenced via the feedback sheets we have produced which identify what has been understood, what is popular, plus ideas for further learning opportunities.

The topics the individuals are involved with are : Nutrition, Equality and Diversity, Oral Health, Health and Safety and Safeguarding.”

Mandy Sinnick, deputy manager, tells us about her Champion role with R and the work that went into their latest presentation: “R and I have been planning our Champion’s talk on oral hygiene. We have been researching online around the subject of oral health including how to brush teeth, cheeks and gums along with the reason why this is important.

Our information has been gained from the following sources: NICE guidelines, CQC’s Smiling Matters and information from our local dental practice. We will be supporting our talk with an easy read version for individuals who require it. 

R and I then sat down with all of our resources and planned how to get the message across in a fun way. Following our planning meeting we have made a giant mouth, dressed ourselves with a sandwich board and tooth hat which he helped to make, and using two sets of teeth we covered them in red plaque dye and encouraged everyone to try and brush this dye off. We used our local dental practice’s teeth-cleaning guide.

We ended our talk with an an oral health assessment tool showing individuals how and why we complete these monthly assessments. Informing everyone that the information used is in a oral health file in the office.”

🔊 Listen to this