Caring Times, June 2018

Care and Support West, a body representing social care and health providers in the South West has joined up with Skills for Health to create an integrated online training hub for local providers.

The organisation says the partnership with Skills for Health’s ‘skills platform’ was made in response to member feedback, to tackle urgent issues surrounding the provision of quality, evidence-based training in the adult care sector.

“For many care home providers, training is a large portion of an ever-shrinking budget,” said Barbara Harris of Care and Support West.

“Smaller organisations don’t have the administrative resources to plan, assess and analyse the market to get best value and quality. Our partnership with the skills platform really helps providers in the local area to access the best quality training.

“The Skills Platform’s broadcast function is a great way to make the budgets go further. I’m sure this is something our members will appreciate.”

The platform provides an online marketplace where employers and individuals can search for and compare solutions to their training needs – whether that is direct training, mentoring, consultancy, e-learning or more informal activity. It also offers the facility for employers to make their training provision available to external customers.

The Skills Platform is hosted by Skills for Health who are a registered charity and a not for profit organisation. Skills for Health are the sector skills council for health, operating in partnership with the National Skills Academy for Health to improve skills in healthcare.

Sam Hawker from AbleCare Homes in Bristol said: “We run our own mandatory training courses and have a network of established training providers but sometimes find it hard to source what we need when a new or specialist subject comes up. The search facility on the platform will mean we can easily look for courses running in our area and book team members onto the courses with no fuss.”

Care and Support West are using a localised version of the skills platform which gives access to local and national training provision, with a range of providers including organisations that care homes might not think to access such as the University of West of England Bristol. ')}