15th December 2020
Within the care industry as a whole, there is a shortage of nurses. This shortage feeds into the care patients receive, putting more strain on the healthcare team and creating dependency on agency workers. Care home assistant practitioners work alongside registered nurses to reduce the strain and provide high quality, person-centred care to patients and service users.
CHAPs are members of the healthcare team whose role is designed to support nurses. They carry out some of the duties originally performed by nurses, helping to ease the pressure due to the current shortage. This support means that patients are able to receive the best care possible.
The CHAPs role is essentially an enhanced healthcare assistant role. It will allow you to carry out activities such as administering medication and creating care plans, under the supervision of a registered nurse. You will be able to directly impact on the care provided to care home residents, whilst developing your clinical and managerial skills.
Care home assistant practitioners will be required to carry out a variety of roles within the care home setting. Those who choose to become a CHAP may be asked to carry out clinical skills duties such as:
This list is not exhaustive of all the duties you will carry out as a care home assistant practitioner however offers an insight into the role of a CHAP in supporting nurses within a care home setting.
In order to become a care home practitioner, you must first have experience as a care assistant. You may also require qualifications in subjects such as health and social care. Becoming a CHAP is a big step up from a care assistant, therefore you must be dedicated to the programme. You must have the drive to want to develop new skills and progress your leadership and managerial skills further. In addition to this, you should already have good communication, observation and organisation skills.
If this sounds like you, or a member of your healthcare team enrolling on a CHAPs training course is the next step.
The CHAPS training course utilises a blended learning approach designed to upskill the competence of health and social care practitioners to support registered nurses in care homes.
Here at Guardian Angels Training, we provide a bespoke CHAPs training course to fully train and ensure the competency of your care home assistant practitioners. We can also help with the initial introduction of CHAPS into your care home, helping to implement policies, procedures, systems of work, clinical procedure guidelines, as well as performing continued training and competency assessments for trainee CHAPS.
The benefit of our programme is that it is tailor-made for your care home. We take the time to get to know the needs of your organisation, your staff and of your patients and service users. From this, we are able to create a bespoke Care Home Assistant Practioner training course that is unique to your needs and does not offer transferability to other care providers. This ensures that your investment in your staff is safe, allowing you to retain your care home assistant practitioners.
For more information on our CHAPs training course, speak to a member of the Guardian Angels Training team today!