Community Mentoring
Tools for Providers
- Mentors, skills, capabilities and recruitment
- Skills sets
- Competences
- Recruitment
- Training
- Performance Management Information
- Charging Framework
- Organisational Structures
Mentors, skills, capabilities and recruitment
Mentoring for social re-engagement is a new occupation and understanding of the skills and capabilities required to deliver are likely to develop.
Existing schemes are successfully employing staff using methods and skills from the skills sets of the following occupational groups: (psychiatric) occupational therapists; adult educators; community development workers; trainers.
While there is no ideal skills set from an existing occupation which can be identified, mentors require high level skills in:
- Person centred assessment
- Goal planning
- Motivation
- Group work and group dynamics
- Coaching
- Inter-personal dynamics
- Communication
- Problem solving
- Negotiating skills
- Strong organisational skills
- Ability to work independently,
- Managing resources effectively including their own time
- Working in a way which develops the community’s ability to sustain its vulnerable members.
Basic competences required:
- Strong analytic skills, to be able to assess needs, interests, capabilities and risks with older people, and to assess effectiveness and progress when interventions are in place.
- To be able to work across agencies and sectors, health and social services, education, leisure, the arts, and the voluntary and community sectors.
- To be able to work effectively with older people, valuing their skills and experience.
- Good communication skills and ability to listen.
- To be able to manage the delicate balance between gaining people’s confidence and not creating dependency links.
- To negotiate with local community and voluntary groups and creative or learning providers to set up local activities.
- To work on a confidential basis.
- To be imaginative, resourceful and to have highly developed problem-solving abilities.
- To be able to set up groups and networks and move them towards independence.
- To be able to work alone with minimal direction, managing time efficiently and effectively.
- To be able to work as a member of a team, sharing experience, information and responsibility.
- To be able to develop others to do a similar job.
- To be able to signpost people effectively to appropriate services as needed.
Experience of the two LAP pilot schemes suggests that mentoring is an attractive job.
- Part time and sessional working may be efficient ways of staffing the service for particular types of need (for example minority groups) or to cover large rural areas.
- The occupation is attractive to experienced and skilled workers with a range of backgrounds including in health or social care.
There is no experience as yet of recruiting mentors for minority ethnic community groups or for other groups such as gay and lesbian older people.
- An initial curriculum (below) based on the Upstream experience has been drafted but requires further work.
- Core induction training for all new recruits:
- Mentoring principles and methods
- Provider organisation’s policies and processes
- Local community:
“map” of existing community facilities
local older people’s organisations
local statutory sector, organisation, personnel, operations (e.g. targets, eligibility for social care etc) and pre-occupations (e.g. prevention of falls etc)
- Asessment and enabling skills working with older people in a person-centred way, delivered by a clinical psychologist or similarly trained health professional. Sessions by clinical psychologist.
- Group work and dynamics
- General basic training:
risk management for home visiting
360 degree well being check
falls awareness and prevention
first aid
Dealing with mental health issues
- Personally tailored training
To be specified for each recruit depending on background skills - Continuous professional development
To be delivered in collaboration with the commissioner and other mentoring providers.
Performance Management Information
The following Performance Management information is suggested as key to monitoring performance:
- number of new referrals per month and number per fte mentor;
- time elapsed between receipt of MDT referrals and start of assessment face to face with service user
- time users remain on active mentor caseloads
- numbers “discharged” from the service each month and reasons
- use of each level of service (see chart 2 in appendix yyy) by number of users
- cost per case (unit cost)
- equality monitoring information.
During the Devon pilot Providers are also required to work with the Peninsula Medical School Evaluation. Core tasks include:
- assisting the evaluation in recruiting clients of the mentoring service into the independent evaluation
- keep accurate records describing all referrals made to mentoring services and the care package implemented by the mentors
- working with the research team to provide regular summary information on the staffing and delivery of the mentoring intervention which can be used to support the economic evaluation of the service.
- Providing descriptive data on the profile of service users (age, gender, source of referral etc)
- provide additional data (currently being agreed) for the purposes of the National Evaluation.
In addition:
- Providers will monitor and provide information to the commissioner on base assessments of service users and final outcomes for users according to common protocols which will be provided by the commissioner.
- User satisfaction surveys will be conducted using approved tools
- User feedback gained in informal consultations will be provided regularly.
Participants will not be charged for the services of mentors.
Participants will ordinarily be responsible for paying directly the costs of transport and fees etc associated with groups and activities. These must not include charges for the time of mentors.
Where providers make arrangements for activities they will make them with due regard for sustainability and seek to keep them within affordable reach of service users without subsidy. “Affordable reach” has been found by experience of existing providers to be around £2 per session. Lunch, and tea and coffee may be additional to this.
Exceptions are:
- Where providers are working with participants who require substantial support to participate in social activities in the early stages and for whom it is judged a charge would prevent them trying a new activity
- Where transport is arranged in the early days of working with someone, for example until solutions can be found which do not require transport, or community solutions can be put in place.
- Where an “outing” is arranged with the agreement of participants – for example to a swimming pool, or for a “day out”.
Where local statutory organisations wish to seek the views of participants in a specific consultation, and invite them to attend to discuss such matters, the organisation requiring the consultation shall pay for transport, refreshments and any substitute care costs in the case of carers and there shall be no charge to the users (nor cost to the provider except for mentor’s costs). This does not apply when general discussions take place as part of meetings or events which were already planned to take place.
Organisational structures will not be prescribed.
Requirements are that:
- Providers have in place efficient arrangements to provide dedicated mentoring cover linked to each MDT/cluster in the prescribed area, depending on VCS arrangements.
- Providers have in place arrangements to provide specialist mentoring to members of BME and other minority groups, such as gay and lesbian people as this is needed.
- Providers make arrangements for coordination of mentors, for example to receive and allocate referrals, liaise with referrers, collate and report on evaluation and monitoring requirements, make arrangements for training etc.
- Providers come together at county level for higher level training and development arrangements.
