With our experience and specialist understanding of a wide range of psychology-informed approaches to case management and inclusive work with injury clients, PsychWorks Associates offers a range of expert, flexible and tailored training to you and your teams.
- A. Creating a supportive environment
- B. Working therapeutically with client issues
- C. Improving team-working for client benefit
Working within a trauma informed approach…within an MDT seems incredibly powerful. I’m looking forward to the next time we train together and learn more from her experiences.
Dr Deborah Kingston, Consultant Psychologist
The presenters were well informed and had a healthy grasp of our roles
Attendee at Psychologically-informed support working the medico-legal context
This three-hour workshop is designed to give support workers a solid foundation in working in a psychologically minded way with their injured clients. This workshop will give a brief overview of all the training we consider essential to working in a psychologically informed way for support workers. We recommend staff teams purchase further, more specialised training depending on their clients specific needs. This session covers:
- A brief introduction to legal frameworks including the MCA, DOLS and Safeguarding.
- Professionalism and warmth, how to support your client kindly while maintaining boundaries.
- Understanding your client in the context of their pre-injury life, the impact of the injury and psychological adjustment.
- Understanding psychological barriers to rehabilitation and the role of the support worker in overcoming these and feeding back to the MDT.
- Discussing case studies and applying theory.
This three hour workshop is suitable for case managers, solicitors and care teams interested in building and maintaining a therapeutic alliance with their injured client. We know that the therapeutic alliance between personal injury professionals and their clients has a significant impact on wellbeing and rehabilitation outcomes. Despite this, it is common for personal injury professionals and their clients to have difficulty in building and maintaining a relationship.
This session will cover:
- What is the therapeutic alliance and why is it so important?
- How personal injury and the medico legal context impact on the therapeutic alliance.
- How to develop a strong therapeutic alliance from the start.
- How to recover a therapeutic alliance if you didn’t get off to the best start.
- Rupture and repair: how to repair the therapeutic alliance when things go wrong.
- Moving on: how to prepare the client (and yourself) for the end of the working relationship.
This 3-hour session is aimed at personal injury professionals including case managers and support workers to help them navigate how to set up and maintain boundaries in a kind and meaningful way. The session will cover:
- What are boundaries and why do we need them?
- How to set up boundaries from the start
- How to identify issues with boundaries
- How to address boundary difficulties
- Discussion of case examples- either from your organization or from our own set of clinical vignettes.
Formulation is a way of developing an understanding of how a person has come to think, feel and behave in the way they do. It draws on psychological theory and our ability to build an alliance with our clients. It can help the client to feel understood and guide your decision making. This three-hour workshop will be useful for all personal injury professionals and will cover the following:
- Why formulation is important
- Different models of formulation
- Maintenance cycles
- Longitudinal formulation
- Practical applications of formulation in working with medico-legal clients.
Working in personal injury can have a significant emotional impact on all of the professionals involved. Hearing about the trauma other people have experienced can cause feelings of stress, anxiety and sadness in ourselves. It can be hard to switch off from work and we can feel deeply pulled to ‘fix’ our clients by working so hard we burn ourselves out. As such it is particularly important that anyone working in personal injury has some skills in noticing and managing their own mental health. This three-hour session will cover:
- Understanding the impact of working in personal injury
- Identifying your own personal warning signs
- How to avoid burnout
- How to manage the emotional impact of the work
- How to improve wellbeing
- When and how to seek help
Sadly, the Personal Injury field in the UK is not exempt from the challenges that race dynamics bring. In fact, because of the traumatic nature of the experiences our clients have had, it is more likely that our non-white clients have heightened threat and fear responses making it more likely that their past race experiences will be triggered possibly leading to disengagement and poor rehab outcomes.
How then can we as Personal Injury professionals do to manage any fall-out?
In this training we look at:
- A brief revisit of (living) history of race relations
- Racial trauma and its prevalence
- The difference between racism and responses to adverse life experiences
- What does racism in Personal Injury work look like?
- What witnessing and experiencing racism does to us as individuals, as professionals, a society, a nation, and as a global community.
- What to do if faced with racism at work (but, applicable, of course, to any setting)
- Self-care, peer-care and client-care
It is common for clients to engage in risky and distressing behaviour following a brain injury or indeed, any life changing injury. It can be hard to know how best to respond when someone is highly distressed or behaving in a highly offensive way. This three hour workshop is aimed at care teams and case managers and will cover the following:
- What is challenging behaviour?
- Why challenging behaviour occurs.
- Proactive strategies to reduce challenging behaviour.
- Reactive strategies to manage challenging behaviour when it occurs.
- How to make useful behavioural recordings.
- How to make sense of the data.
- How to write a behaviour management plan.
Working in personal injury means we are often, if not always working with psychological trauma. Trauma can make it difficult for our clients to engage in rehabilitation and they may need additional support to manage their processing of events. The impact of trauma on professionals including case managers and support workers can also be intense and if not recognised can lead to burn out. This session is aimed at case managers and support workers and will cover:
- What is trauma?
- What is a ‘normal’ reaction to trauma?
- When does someone need additional support?
- How to work with someone who is experiencing the psychological symptoms of trauma?
- How to notice and manage your own reactions to trauma in your clients.
- The three brain ‘states’ that motivate our behaviour.
- The impact of self-criticism on our ‘threat’ state.
- The ‘threat-drive’ loop.
- How to de-activate the threat system and activate the soothing system.
- How to introduce compassion and build it up.
- How to use some of the principles of CFT with your clients.
- The basic theory behind CBT.
- How CBT works.
- When CBT might be helpful.
- How CBT can inform your practice as a personal injury professional.
Acceptance and commitment therapy offers some useful ways of helping us all to connect with the present, identify what matters and take values based action. This three-hour session will cover:
- The basics of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
- How ACT is applied in the personal injury context.
- How ACT is usefully applied to ourselves.
- Ways of identifying values.
- Ways of making contact with the present moment.
- How to ‘unhook’ from unhelpful patterns of behaviour and take values-based action.
Supervision at its core is the same for most helping professionals, but there is a science behind it and research that suggests that better supervision helps staff retention and less burn-out.
So, what is good supervision and what does it look like? How do we provide it effectively for our care teams?
In this course, you will learn to:
- provide your staff or care teams with consultation on their work with clients
- enhance the quality and competence of practice offered to all clients and their families
- offer the supervisee intellectual challenge enabling reflection, transformational learning and psychological support to maximise their responsibility for appropriate self-care; and
- contribute to the CPD of both the supervisee and supervisor by developing competence in the use and practise of supervision.
This course is suitable for case managers supervising care teams and other case managers. It will focus on the principles and structure of supervision that are applicable for many professionals involved in personal care. Where else can you go with all those thoughts?
Do you manage a group of staff who are working in a challenging or distressing environment? Do you want to look after their mental health and support them to support each other? Perhaps you are having difficulty retaining staff for a client with complex needs?
At Psychworks Associates we can offer several options for staff support, depending on the needs of your staff team. Please get in touch with us to discuss the team you have in mind.
Are you asking a care team to follow guidelines and care plans specific to a clients needs? Do they need support to put theory into practice? Perhaps there are some tricky issues around boundaries or challenging behaviour.
Reflective practice sessions are a brilliant way of ensuring training and guidelines are applied in practice. Staff teams can work together to discuss their client, examine their practice and seek support with their work. Please get in touch to discuss your staff team and their needs.
