Domiciliary Care
We aim to provide skilled, experienced and professionally trained support staff to work with service users in partnership with their carers to enable service users to live a fulfilling life within their home or to support them in the community. At Shared Care, our main principle is to achieve and maintain high-quality services and attain the highest possible customer satisfaction.
Foster Care
We are committed to providing stable and high-quality foster care placements that value, support and encourage children to grow, develop and lead a fulfilling life. We have developed expertise specifically in supporting children with disabilities to achieve the best outcomes for them whilst placed with our foster carers.
Introduction
Shared Care Services Ltd. Founded in 2003 as an independent Domiciliary Care agency, we are registered and regulated by the Care Quality Commission (CQC). For our latest CQC inspection report, please click here. We have developed expertise in supporting children and adults with disabilities who display difficult and challenging behaviour to support and enable them to live within the family/community environment.
In addition, Shared Care Services is at the forefront of providing loving and nurturing foster families for children and young people with disabilities & complex medical needs. We specialise in recruiting foster carers to look after children with special and complex needs.
We provide foster care to children with disabilities & complex medical needs in accordance with the 'Fostering Services: National Minimum Standards' and 'The Fostering Services (England) Regulations 2011'.
We have been registered with Ofsted as an Independent Fostering Agency since 2011. For our latest Ofsted inspection report, please click here.
Shared Care Services Ltd is managed by professionally qualified Social Workers with more than 35 years of experience in the field of disability and management. We are particularly proud of our rich working experience as Social Workers for children with disabilities.
We are a specialist care agency working in partnership with the London Boroughs of Hackney, Havering, Islington, Newham, Redbridge, Southwark, Waltham Forest, and West Sussex Council.
Children with Disabilities & Safeguarding
'Children with Disabilities are three to four times more likely than non-disabled children to be abused or neglected. They are more susceptible to bullying and mental health disorders. Their families are more susceptible to high levels of stress, lower levels of parental wellbeing and poverty. Therefore, it is particularly important that good services are available to these families and that the services are provided with appropriate safeguards'. (Ref: Department of Children, Schools, and Families).
Safeguarding is at the forefront of our practice. We intend to keep all children safe at home and in the community. We follow the safeguarding legislation by protecting children. We take action to enable all children to have the best outcomes.
Children with disabilities who come into foster care can be from any social, ethnic, or religious background. The common factor may be that their families are in a crisis. As a result, they need to leave the family home and be placed with foster carers. Crises may arise from the parents' need for some form of respite. In other circumstances, the child may have been harmed, abused or is at risk of suffering harm if left with the family/carers.
As a care provider, we have clear policies and procedures which reflect the statutory guidance and local multi-agency procedures. We invest in our support workers, foster carers, staff, and management by providing safeguarding training programmes and they all understand and follow safeguarding policies and procedures.
Our Principles, Standards of Care, and Quality Assurance measures
Shared Care Services aims to be an organisation of excellence in social care services. We are a BS EN ISO 9001-2015 certified organisation for our Quality Assurance Systems. We measure the quality of our service through consultation and feedback. Overall, service user's satisfaction is measured through our quality assurance system. Service users are requested to provide free and frank feedback which will help us in assessing the quality of our services.
We recognise that a child's needs are best met in the setting of a nurturing family. While identifying a support worker or placing the child with a foster family, we take into consideration the children's identified care needs: severity of their disabilities, communication level, language preferences, socio-cultural factors & religious needs.
We are committed to providing fostering services that meet and exceed minimum legislative care standards. We provide value for money to local authorities and high standards of care saving social workers and managers valuable time in accessing our service. Our philosophy is to show positive regard for the child's ethnic, religious, and cultural needs. The primary force behind Shared Care Services is to work towards ensuring that all children, whatever their background or circumstances, should have the support they need to be healthy, stay safe, enjoy, achieve, make a positive contribution and achieve economic wellbeing.
Shared Care Services helps children who come into care to rebuild their self-esteem. We know that children who come into care have usually suffered trauma – if for no other reason than because they have been removed from their birth family. Our purpose at Shared Care is to help the children & young people recover from their trauma and develop a life that is full and satisfying.
Principles of Equality & Diversity
As an organisation, we are fully committed to principles of equality and diversity, and these are integral parts of the organisation as a whole.
At Shared Care Services, we wish to be known as an equal opportunity employer, and so we ensure that all service users and employees are treated equally and are recruited, trained, and promoted based on their ability and requirements of the job.
Training: A Learning Organisation
At Shared Care Services, we recognise the importance of the continuous learning, training, and development. This applies to our support workers, foster carers, staff, and management in providing quality services.
At Shared Care Services, training programmes are organised regularly and cover all subjects, like caring for children with medical needs and learning sign language, that foster carers may require to meet the needs of disabled children in their care. We have high standards, and therefore we encourage our foster carers to complete the Qualifications and Credit Framework (QCF) level 3 in Child Care.
For our new team members, we organise a comprehensive induction programme, and regularly have a supervision meeting that includes discussion on building up their knowledge on social care regulations, examples of best practices within the social care field, and providing co-working/shadowing & mentoring opportunities to update and strengthen their skills. We are delighted that more than 80% of our support workers have achieved QCF Level 2 or higher levels in Health and Social Care and have relevant qualifications in childcare.
We have a pool of experienced support workers who have been trained in working with children exhibiting difficult behaviour. They adopt various approaches such as rewarding positive behaviour, diversion & distraction techniques to manage difficult behaviour, and channelling service user's energy constructively through recreational and play-based activities.
To achieve this, Shared Care Services has adopted a culture that can be branded as a 'Learning Organisation' whereby our support workers, foster carers, staff and management become more:
Service user focused
Productive and efficient
Skilled and flexible
Committed and motivated