There are many different areas of care in which you can start your career in.
Whether you choose to work with children, the elderly, or if you choose to work with adults with learning disabilities; your career choice can make a positive and impactful change on other people’s lives.
Caring For Adults
To support a people with learning disabilities, you need to be caring, patient and have a passion for improving the lives of others. You must also be willing to learn and develop on an on-going basis, this may be learning from the adults you are supporting, from your colleagues, or through training and development courses.
Care for adults with learning disabilities is provided through a person-centred approach. Taking a person-centred approach to care means that we do things with them, not to or for them. Person-centred care allows these adults to grow and develop, to control their own environment and to learn in ways that they would never have been able to without this structure to their care.
By supporting adults with learning disabilities in a person-centred approach, you get to know and understand people on an individual basis. You understand their needs, wants, their personality, what they respond to and help them to reach their goals in a way that allows them to be fully in control.
Promoting Health and Well-Being
As a Support Worker, working with adults with learning disabilities, you are responsible not only for fulfilling a person-centred care plan, designed, either in full or in part, by the adult themselves, but you are also responsible for promoting and supporting the health and well-being of the adult(s) you are working with.
This means promoting, guiding and advising about positive health choices, including taking regular exercise and eating healthy foods. This means you might be involved with shopping for, and preparing the sensible, healthy meal choices you are advising about.
When it comes to well-being, this might mean you prompt (and perhaps assist in some cases) a person to have a shower or bath, brush their teeth and hair, and to wash their clothes or bedsheets (for example).
All these things that we do on a daily basis, without giving it much thought, are the kinds of things you will be responsible for guiding and assisting the adults you work with through.
Delivering person-centred care means that you will empower the person you are working with to achieve all that they can, as independently as possible. Therefore, this approach to supporting adults with learning disabilities is not only hugely beneficial to the adult being supported, but it’s also a hugely rewarding experience for the carer.
Supporting people with learning disabilities is a rewarding, if challenging profession. It’s not always easy but it is bursting with fulfilling experiences that make the everyday demands of the profession a wonderfully worthwhile pursuit.
Want to know More?
Read more about person-centred care, or our blog ‘What Does a Support Worker Do’ for more information. Or see what it’s like to work at Encompass by watching our video.