Empowering you to empower others

Improving your motivation 

According to the 2021 NHS staff survey, only 52.5% of staff look forward to going to work, 39.4% feel that their work frustrates them, 46.5% feel worn out at the end of their working day/ shift and 31.1% feel exhausted at the thought of another day/ shift at work. It is widely known that there are many challenges within healthcare, and yet we believe that if all health professionals were able to take a consultation approach that enabled them to witness a higher degree of positive change in their patients, this can only have a positive impact on morale and motivation.

Making a difference to care

In the NHS Long Term Plan published in 2019, personalised care was one of the five major, practical changes that were highlighted with the target of rolling out personalised care to 2.5 million people by 2023/24. This followed a decade of evidence-based research working with patients and community groups. The Aligned Care Diploma is the next step in developing your ability to provide personalised and holistic care.

Meeting the challenge of multi-morbidities

In its House of Care Model, NHS England state that “The 15 million people in England with long-term conditions have the greatest healthcare needs of the population (50% of all GP appointments and 70% of all bed days) and their treatment and care absorbs 70% of acute and primary care budgets in England. It is clear that current models of dealing with long-term conditions are not sustainable. Rather than people having a single condition, multimorbidity is becoming the norm.”

Enhancing partnership working

In the Kings Fund publication of September 2010 ‘How to deliver high-quality, patient-centred, cost-effective care’ this collective effort of ten of the leading health and social care organisations in the voluntary sector to identify the five key themes that the health and social care system must embrace to be sustainable and to ensure quality expressed the following: Many patients are keen to be partners in maintaining their health, rather than passive recipients of care (Department of Health 2007). Only half of patients responding to a national inpatient survey said they had definitely been involved as much as they wanted to be in decisions about their care (Picker Institute Europe 2009). In the case of long-term conditions in general, supporting staff to develop skills that enable them to work in partnership with patients has been found to improve patients’ confidence in managing their own condition (Powell et al 2009), which can mean a better experience for patients and reduced use of health care services.

The Programme

Recognising that it can be challenging for busy healthcare professionals like you to attend live courses, our online diploma can be completed at a time and pace that fits with your needs.

This course can be counted towards your CPD with 6 CPD points.

This is a pre-recorded online course. On payment you will receive access to our online learning platform and will have access to the course for 6 months

The need for personalised and holistic care has long been highlighted, and yet there is little available that enhances the skills of the health professional to meet this need in a practical and realistic way. The Aligned Care Programmes have been developed with input from GPs, pharmacists, podiatrists, nurses and other health care professionals to provide a practical approach to filling the skills gap in providing a personalised and holistic care approach to every consultation and conversation.

This online Aligned Care Diploma for Long-term conditions concentrates on the NICE guidelines updated in 2021 (CG138) ‘Patient experience in adult NHS services: improving the experience of care for people using adult NHS services’ and (NG197) published in June 2021 ‘Shared decision making’ and recognises the need to take an aligned and holistic, whole-person approach to patient care, particularly for those patients with multiple long-term conditions.

Rather than treat each long-term condition individually, this programme recognises the cross implications of multiple-morbidities and emphasises the need to align the management and treatment to the person, rather than simply treat the disease.

This aligned, personalised care approach means that people have a choice and control over the way their care is planned and delivered. It is based on ‘what matters’ to them and their individual strengths and needs. It provides you with the core skills to get beneath the surface of the presenting problem and discover the beliefs, values and circumstances which define the unique way in which each person experiences a condition and its impact on their life. By doing this, you will find that you not only improve the patient experience, but also encourage the patient to take ownership of their own health outcomes and make positive behavioural changes that can have a major impact on clinical outcomes.

Enhance your consultations. 

Enhance the results for you and your patients.

Who is the programme for?

This programme is designed to be the next step in enhancing your consultation skills to enrich the level of personalised and holistic care you are able to provide.

It is ideal for anyone who has the opportunity for consultations or conversations with those suffering with long-term conditions including:

• Advanced Nurse Practitioners
• Trainee doctors
• GPs
• Practice Nurses
• District Nurses
• Community therapists
• Health Care Assistants
• Pharmacists
• Social Prescribers
• Care Co-ordinators and Care Navigators
• Physician Associates
• Podiatrists
• Outpatient teams

Course Contents

• Understanding the need for a change in approach to managing patients with multiple or single long-term conditions and how the whole person Aligned Care approach for patients can improve their quality of life
• How taking an Aligned Patient Care approach can have a positive impact on clinical outcomes and reap benefits for patients, their carers, health professionals, the NHS and other Health Care Organisations
• The difference taking this approach makes when involving the patient in personal care planning
• An overview of long-term conditions, their symptoms and impact
• How to use clinical skills and information gathering to deliver care using a whole person, aligned care approach
• What stops people changing behaviours, even when they know this is the right thing to do
• The keys to using a motivational interviewing and coaching approach for patients with long-term conditions in order to engage and encourage patients and carers to be more involved in managing their condition and aligning their needs, wants and aspirations to the management of their care
• Interpreting investigations and communicating results to patients in a way that they understand
• Simple steps to improve rapport, trust and mutual respect
• Understanding motivation and how to align your questions to increase the motivation for change
• The impact of a person’s beliefs, and how they see themselves, on the management of their own care
• Why education alone does not work
• How to listen for the difference that makes the difference
• How to ask questions that get beneath the layers of the presenting problem and encourage a change in behaviour
• Bringing all you learn easily into your consultations

Your Trainers

The Aligned Care Programmes were developed by Jo Creed of J&S Development Services Ltd. and Annette Bradley of MA Training Enterprise Ltd.

Having over 40 years’ experience working within the NHS, Jo and Annette both have an intense passion for empowering health professionals and empowering patients and for some time recognised that their joint expertise could be the difference that made the difference.

During a video chat early during the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020, they realised that there had been a number of initiatives within the NHS with the aim of providing a more holistic and person centred approach to the care of patients with long-term conditions but little had been done to provide the health professionals with the skills and expertise needed to really take this into their practice. From this conversation, the Aligned Care Programmes were born!

Annette Bradley is an Advanced Nurse Practitioner, NMC registered Tutor and Director of MA Training Enterprise who works in Primary care. She has been a Senior Lecturer for the University of Wolverhampton for over a decade and had a book published- Practice Nursing- The Fulcrum of Primary Care.

Her 30 years’ experience as a Practice Nurse revealed to her how difficult it was to access training and that Training and Education was very ad hoc and that there was a wide Practice-Theory gap. This sparked her interest for making training and education accessible, patient centred, holistic and inspirational, which she now takes into her work as a clinical skills trainer.

Jo Creed has been working withing healthcare for over 18 years, initially as an Excellence Director within Primary Care.

Since 2011 she has been helping health professionals and organisations handle the challenges of working within the NHS and also providing them with ways to empower patients to own their own health outcomes. With her foundations in human psychology, she has gone on to combine the skills and tools of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Clean Language, Behavioural Psychology, Transactional Analysis and Motivational Interviewing and is passionate about providing NHS professionals with the means to bring an easy to apply coaching methodology into their consulting to improve clinical results and enable the patient to feel they are receiving a patient-centred service.

Jo Creed is also an experienced trainer, speaker, coach and double award-winning trainer of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and specialises in communication, behavioural and organisational change