A care plan can be known by a few different names including, a plan of care, personal learning plan and life plan. Regardless of the name they are all essentially the same.
When formulating a care plan one of the first tasks should be to complete a risk assessment of the individual, the SSSC Codes of Practice (code 4) clearly states “as a social service worker, you must respect the rights of service users while seeking to ensure that their behaviour does not harm themselves or other people”.
The health and safety executive give clear guidelines that should be used when planning a risk assessment.
Step 1
Identify the hazards
Step 2
Decide who might be harmed and how
Step 3
Evaluate the risks and decide on precautions
Step 4
Record your findings and implement them
Step 5
Review your assessment and update if necessary
At my place of work (residential school) we also use an Individual Crisis Management Plan, this is another risk assessment that we use and mainly used on the YP’s Behaviour. The ICMP indicates any safety concerns or warnings, any potential triggers, any behaviours of concern and any physical intervention strategies that is not recommended we use on the YP.
There are different models of care and methods of working when supporting people in care. I have used person centred planning (PCP) for many years.
The title 'person-centered' is used because those who developed it and used it initially shared a belief that services tend to work in a 'service-centered' way. This 'service-centered' behavior appears in many forms, but an example is that a person