Our care

All our supported living and residential care locations offer support in all aspects of a person’s life including their mental health and tailor support plans to reflect each person’s individual needs and wishes. Here at Lifeways, our teams receive specialist training to ensure we deliver high quality support for people living with complex needs, including:

• An acquired brain injury
• Learning disabilities
• Autism
• Physical disabilities
• Mental health

Taking a person-centred approach

What does person-centred mean?

If you’re familiar with care services you may have heard the phrase 'person-centred' before. Put simply this approach ensures that the people we support are able to develop the knowledge, skills and confidence they require to manage and make informed decisions about their own lives, health and support - treating them as equal partners at all times.

How does Lifeways take a person-centred approach?

To work effectively in this way we’ve made sure that all of our team have the right values and specialist training in providing this approach and that we continually monitor its delivery. It's important that we work in collaboration with health and social care professionals to provide a consistent, open and inclusive way of working. We make sure to directly involve the people we support and their families to help shape the future of our services. You can read more about Co-production here.

We ensure we enable the people we support to have a voice by carefully considering accessibility to this information, providing it in a range of formats. By taking this approach, we’ve successfully planned and delivered a range of new personalised systems, embracing and encouraging innovation which enables the people we support to live happy, independent and fulfilled lives.

Providing Positive Behaviour Support (PBS)

What is PBS?

We use Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) to support individuals who may be described as exhibiting challenging behaviours. PBS enables individuals to communicate and get the life they want by maximising choice and control, using active support principles to increase participation in everyday tasks, building new skills and taking positive risks in a well-planned and safe manner.

How does PBS work?

Our Specialist Support team uses a functional behavioural assessment to understand the reasons why an individual may display challenging behaviours, and from this will create a person-centred PBS plan which focusses on strategies to help improve quality of life and create opportunities for meaningful engagement.

The PBS approach involves:

• adapting the support team’s communication skills to meet the individual’s needs
• teaching new skills to help the person we support to become more independent
• supporting the individual to find different ways of coping with situations they find difficult
• reducing the need for the support team to implement restrictive physical intervention.

Our in-house Specialist Support team consists of PBS Practitioners and Specialist Trainers who work in close partnership with the people we support, their families and staff teams to provide ongoing support and guidance.

Alison’s story

Alison moved to Lifeways from her family home aged 38. Alison lives with autism, a moderate learning disability and was considered to be non verbal. There had been numerous previous attempts at setting up respite placements and support at home, but these had always broken down.

When Alison first moved to Lifeways, her support team found it difficult to understand some of her signs and she was very resistant to any demands being placed upon her. However, with consistency and reassurance, within four weeks Alison had taught staff most of her signs, along with learning to use the microwave, make drinks and do her own laundry.

Over the next few months, Alison was able to spend more time out in the community doing the things she enjoyed most, including visits to coffee shops, and behavioural incidents reduced in both severity and frequency.