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Creating a supportive environment

Do your clients need support workers who understand the psychological impact of being injured? Do you want to create a staff team who are confident and skilled in working with your client and helping them to meet their rehabilitation goals? Maybe you know your staff team needs more training but you don’t know where to start?

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.
Your relationship with your client or the therapeutic alliance is one of the most important tools you have in helping them to meet their rehabilitation goals. Have you ever wondered what the best way of starting a good working relationship is? How to check whether or not the therapeutic alliance is solid? What to do if there is a problem with the alliance?

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.
Do you struggle with a client who is frequently making phone calls in the evenings and at the weekends? Do you want to establish some limits within your relationship without damaging your therapeutic alliance? Or maybe you have a staff team who are struggling to remain professional with the client and their family? Maybe you feel as if they are getting pulled into doing things outside of their role?

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.
Would you like to be able to understand your client in the context of their life history as well as their injury? Maybe you’ve realized there is something you can’t make sense of in the way your client presents? Or maybe you would like to increase your ability to pull together their history to help them understand the impact of their injuries.

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.
Would you like to feel more able to cope with work stress? Or maybe you have concerns about the wellbeing of a staff team. It might be that you want to make sure a care team are psychologically equipped to work with an emotionally challenging client from the start.
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
Would you like to feel more able to cope with work stress? Or maybe you have concerns about the wellbeing of a staff team. It might be that you want to make sure a care team are psychologically equipped to work with an emotionally challenging client from the start.
Race is almost certainly one of the most uncomfortable and difficult topics of all time to discuss. Yet, disadvantage due to skin colour is the living experience of so many non-white people globally, despite approximately 75% of the world being made up of non-white people.

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

Working therapeutically with client issues

Are you working with clients who engage in violent, self-injurious, distressing or highly disruptive behaviour? Would you like to understand the reasons behind the behaviour? To know how to prevent the behaviour from occuring in the first place? And how to respond when it happens?

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.

Do you notice the signs of psychological trauma in your clients? Perhaps you wonder how you should respond when clients seem preoccupied by traumatic events? Or maybe you find yourself feeling overwhelmed after hearing the stories of your clients.

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.
Are you noticing a high level of self-criticism in your client or yourself? Maybe you are concerned about a lack of compassion in a staff team or in yourself? Does your client struggle to relax and appear always ‘on the go’. Compassion-focused therapy can help people to balance out their need to ‘do’ with their need to ‘be’ and can help them to address unhelpful levels of self criticism. CFT seeks to increase the person’s level of compassion for themselves and for others, making it ideal for staff at risk of burnout. This three hour session will cover:
  • 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.
You are probably familiar with the term Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). It is the recommended treatment for many common mental health problems. But what exactly is it? Who is it suitable for and how does it work? This three-hour workshop is designed for people working in personal injury and will cover:
  • The basic theory behind CBT.
  • How CBT works.
  • When CBT might be helpful.
  • How CBT can inform your practice as a personal injury professional.
Do you ever wonder how you can help your client identify their values and start to find meaning in their life? Perhaps you feel they are stuck in unhelpful patterns of behaviour? Maybe you think they are focusing too much on the past and not enough on the present?

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.

Improving team-working for client benefit

Race is almost certainly one of the most uncomfortable and difficult topics of all time to discuss. Yet, disadvantage due to skin colour is the living experience of so many non-white people globally, despite approximately 75% of the world being made up of non-white people.

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

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.

Do your clients need support workers who understand the psychological impact of being injured? Do you want to create a staff team who are confident and skilled in working with your client and helping them to meet their rehabilitation goals? Maybe you know your staff team needs more training but you don’t know where to start?

 

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.
Your relationship with your client or the therapeutic alliance is one of the most important tools you have in helping them to meet their rehabilitation goals. Have you ever wondered what the best way of starting a good working relationship is? How to check whether or not the therapeutic alliance is solid? What to do if there is a problem with the alliance?

 

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.
Do you struggle with a client who is frequently making phone calls in the evenings and at the weekends? Do you want to establish some limits within your relationship without damaging your therapeutic alliance? Or maybe you have a staff team who are struggling to remain professional with the client and their family? Maybe you feel as if they are getting pulled into doing things outside of their role?

 

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.
Would you like to be able to understand your client in the context of their life history as well as their injury? Maybe you’ve realized there is something you can’t make sense of in the way your client presents? Or maybe you would like to increase your ability to pull together their history to help them understand the impact of their injuries.

 

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.
Would you like to feel more able to cope with work stress? Or maybe you have concerns about the wellbeing of a staff team. It might be that you want to make sure a care team are psychologically equipped to work with an emotionally challenging client from the start.

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
Race is almost certainly one of the most uncomfortable and difficult topics of all time to discuss. Yet, disadvantage due to skin colour is the living experience of so many non-white people globally, despite approximately 75% of the world being made up of non-white people.

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
Are you working with clients who engage in violent, self-injurious, distressing or highly disruptive behaviour? Would you like to understand the reasons behind the behaviour? To know how to prevent the behaviour from occuring in the first place? And how to respond when it happens?

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.
Do you notice the signs of psychological trauma in your clients? Perhaps you wonder how you should respond when clients seem preoccupied by traumatic events? Or maybe you find yourself feeling overwhelmed after hearing the stories of your clients.

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.
Are you noticing a high level of self-criticism in your client or yourself? Maybe you are concerned about a lack of compassion in a staff team or in yourself? Does your client struggle to relax and appear always ‘on the go’. Compassion-focused therapy can help people to balance out their need to ‘do’ with their need to ‘be’ and can help them to address unhelpful levels of self criticism. CFT seeks to increase the person’s level of compassion for themselves and for others, making it ideal for staff at risk of burnout. This three hour session will cover:

 

  • 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.
You are probably familiar with the term Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). It is the recommended treatment for many common mental health problems. But what exactly is it? Who is it suitable for and how does it work? This three-hour workshop is designed for people working in personal injury and will cover:

 

  • The basic theory behind CBT.
  • How CBT works.
  • When CBT might be helpful.
  • How CBT can inform your practice as a personal injury professional.
Do you ever wonder how you can help your client identify their values and start to find meaning in their life? Perhaps you feel they are stuck in unhelpful patterns of behaviour? Maybe you think they are focusing too much on the past and not enough on the present?

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 is considered an essential part of any professions’ good practice. There is not usually a legal requirement for supervision with most professions, although it is considered an ethical and professional expectation to engage in appropriate consultation in order to foster effective practice. Provision of supervision is therefore an important underpinning to good quality service delivery. All of us will want to know that those working with our clients and their families are offering safe and effective practice. As such, supervision is a requirement of sound practice and key to successful rehabilitation.

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.