As of 1st April 2015 The Care Certificate has replaced the Common Induction Standards (commonly known as CIS). All employees new to care should now be completing The Care Certificate rather than CIS. The main difference between CIS and The Care Certificate is that the Care Certificate requires both knowledge and competence (practical skills) learning outcomes to be achieved and recorded, rather than just knowledge. It also covers more subject areas – 15 standards rather than 8.
What is The Care Certificate?
The purpose of The Care Certificate is to ensure that all new Adult Social Care Workers (ASCWs) and Healthcare Assistants (HCAs) have the right knowledge, practical skills and a compassionate approach to care.
Skills for Health, Skills for Care and Health Education England recently issued a statement explaining how eLearning courses alone do not give learners the opportunity to demonstrate competence. Likewise, at CareShield we understand that eLearning is cost effective and easy to manage. However it is limited in other ways. Therefore CareShield have developed a Care Certificate learning programme that combines 15 new eLearning courses with an interactive workbook. This programme ensures that learners get the opportunity to demonstrate practical skills and competence as required by the new standards and allows assessors to sign off each task as completed to an acceptable standard.
How does it work?
Firstly, eLearning delivers the knowledge elements of the standards, resulting in a sound theoretical understanding of processes, procedures, legislation and concepts. Secondly, the interactive workbook prompts learners to demonstrate and record their ability to perform practical tasks safely, effectively and efficiently. This can be through a supervision or observation, discussion or other means. An occupationally competent assessor must observe these activities and confirm that each competence outcome has been achieved to an acceptable standard. The assessor signs off each activity, also within the interactive workbook.
The interactive workbook displays learner progress and assessor activity both at-a-glance and in detail. As all of the records are held digitally you can still report on them in the same way as you would any other eLearning courses, making compliance and progress reporting quick and easy. Managers can easily run detailed reports to provide evidence for regulators using our intuitive learning platform.
There are a number of subject areas within The Care Certificate standards that benefit from face-to-face training sessions, for example where learners should have the opportunity to observe and practice hands-on skills. CareShield have a market-leading team of professional face-to-face trainers who are current practitioners within social care or the NHS. They deliver face-to-face training both for The Care Certificate and further training, at client sites and as a part of our scheduled course programme across the UK.
The CareShield Care Certificate solution combines the benefits of eLearning and face-to-face tuition. It brings together standardised, cost-effective training with the activities required to achieve and record competence outcomes and the quality assurance associated human intervention.
