RCSLT Webinar: Communicating Quality Live Finding your way through the new professional guidance Monday, 25 th April 2016

Transcription

1 RCSLT Webinar: Communicating Quality Live Finding your way through the new professional guidance Monday, 25 th April 2016, CEO, RCSLT Good afternoon everybody. My name is Kamini Gadhok and I'm chief executive at the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists. Joining me on the webinar this afternoon are Maria Luscombe, who is the Chair of the Board of Trustees she was also the chair of the steering group for CQ Live and Penny Hodgkinson, who is a member of the CQ Live steering group and has been heavily involved in supporting us in developing the guidance. So I ll talk you through a little bit about how the webinar will work in a minute. It s going to be 45 minutes long with questions at the end. For those of you who ve been involved before, but particularly for those who ve never been involved in a webinar, these are just a few top tips. If you want to send in a message through the chat messaging process, please do so by using the chat button. That s particularly for Kaleigh in case you ve got any problems in hearing what s said, or any other technical issues that she might be able to help you with. Also, do send in some questions by using the Q&A button. We will have 10 minutes at the end for questions. We are aware that some of the slides do contain quite a lot of detailed information. So, just to reassure you, this webinar is being recorded and will go online with the slides about a week after the event. And there s a link onto the website there on the slide and, again, we will make sure that we get this out as soon as we can. So just to remember that Kaleigh is on hand to help. We d also like you to tweet if you can and the hashtag being used is #CQLive. So in terms of what we re going to be covering, Maria Luscombe will provide an overview of CQ Live, the journey we ve been on to co-create it and how it will continue to develop. Penny will then highlight a typical problem that many of you may face and she ll use that to show you how to navigate through the CQ Live webpages. And, as I said earlier, there will then be an opportunity for questions. So I'm now going to hand you over to our first speaker, and that s Maria Luscombe. Over to you, Maria. Maria Luscombe, Chair of CQ Live Steering Group; Chair of RCSLT Board of Trustees; Associate Clinical Director & Head of Paediatric Therapy Services, London North West Health Care NHS Trust Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to our CQ Live webinar. It gives me great pleasure to introduce this new tool to you and to take you through the journey we ve been on to create it. First of all, how do you find out about CQ Live? If you go on the RCSLT website, you will see that CQ Live has its own section on the website. You can click on there and you will be entering the webpages around CQ Live. So, what is CQ Live? It s a set of RCSLT guidance and resources to support members to meet the standards of the regulator, the Health & Care Professions Council or HCPC. It is structured around 10 key areas of

2 professional practice and advice, which you should now see in front of you. It s relevant to all members, no matter where we work, and the 10 key areas Penny will refer to further as we progress with the webinar. Within each area, members will find the relevant HCPC standards, the related RCSLT guidance for speech and language therapists, supporting resources including detailed information on topics, for example information governance, the use of apps or inclusive communication. You will also find other relevant RCSLT resources through links. For example, you ll be linked to the research centre, clinical resources and different clinical resource packs around, for example, autism, stroke, etc. So, just to take you back a few steps to where we started out. We needed to find a replacement for the little blue book that we all knew well as CQ3. And, to do that, we needed to move into the digital age and evolve the profession and our environment. The RCSLT guidance on CQ Live will be available as downloadable PDFs and can still be printed off. So for those of you who like the book format, it s still there, albeit in a different way. When we started out on this journey, we had a number of challenges. We knew that CQ3 needed updating. For example, it wasn t always linked to the most updated national policies, it assumed typical management or service structures which many of us no longer work in, there were issues around support, supervision, duty of care and we knew that, in some ways, it didn t fit with our RCSLT organisational structure. So we wanted to create an approach that would support all the profession no matter where you work or within which sector. We wanted to tap into the professional community to feed-in and share good practice, provide a safe but flexible framework that would evolve with the profession and its environment and continue for it to be highquality, but easier to keep up-to-date and more accessible, and to support us to use our professional judgement as autonomous practitioners. We engaged a company called Clever Together, who helped us to engage, or harness, the power of the crowd using technology. And we engaged the profession through two online workshops. Using this, we were able to engage more people in the process than ever before and within a shorter timescale. You will see from the results in front of you that many of you did contribute. Over 1,700 members contributed. We had over 10,000 contributions. You will see that, geographically, we had a good spread of participants and also it is reflective, I think, of the areas within which our membership now work: the NHS, independent sector, universities and voluntary and other sectors, and across the whole field of adults and children s services. We recognise that a growing number of practitioners in some areas of the country do work in independent practice and we wanted to support all members through this website and through this tool. We made an active decision to mainstream working in harmony. We learned that there were differences of opinion, but that we could work in harmony to resolve these and to come up with some solutions. So CQ Live will embed the principles of working in harmony right across the relevant areas of practice. So what I would like to say, the quality of the input was overwhelming from everybody. People were so committed to the project, they took substantial time out of their working day, or outside their working day, to respond. And the comments were really professional, responsible and thoughtful when navigating complex issues. I think what it also showed us was that the profession cares deeply about service users. There was a huge emphasis on person-centred approaches and advocacy, and we know we do our very best to represent service users even when this can potentially bring us into conflict.

3 So what did you tell us? You told us that you wanted information and guidance around various topics. Some of those are already on the website, for example information governance, but others will follow, such as supervision, tele-health apps. Inclusive communication should be available by the end of June, and others will follow. I d like you to take a look at this slide, because I think it represents what CQ Live is all about. You as a professional have to abide by the HCPC standards and the HCPC code of ethics. RCSLT is there to provide you with guidance, with clinical guidelines, but it will be up to each of us as practitioners to then interpret what that means to your particular context, because that s what the HCPC expects from us as autonomous practitioners. So RCSLT will help members to translate into practice. We won t be able to find solutions for everyone, but we will provide guidance, tools, links and assistance and be there to answer your questions as best we can. What we need you to do, though, is to continue your contribution. This isn t something that is now finished; CQ Live will continue to grow and we will continue to provide more support as necessary as we go along the journey. So we need your feedback. You can do this by using CQ Live, sharing practice with your CENs or other networks and help us to develop the new content from the CQ Live as an author or a peer reviewer, and you can see the link here [ or, equally so, you can get involved more by going onto the CQ Live webpage [ and clicking the link there. I would encourage you to continue the great involvement that you ve had to date with this worthy project. And I now hand you over to Penny. Penny Hodgkinson, member of CQ Live Steering Group; Employability Development Director & Lecturer, University of Essex Thank you very much, Maria. I was privileged to be part of the CQ Live steering group. And, in that role, I had an insight into the tremendously rich and varied discourse of all your contributions to the crowdsourcing activity. And so I hope very much that what we re showing you now reflects just how rich and strong as a community we are in developing our professional guidance. What I'm going to do now is take you through some screenshots of how you will encounter Communicating CQ Live. When you click on that link on the website, this screen shows you the front page. So it s very much the welcome, the doorway into this resource, and, as such, it starts by setting out the overarching guidance that we have from our regulatory body. So you will see there that the HCPC standards of conduct, performance and ethics, the standards of proficiency, the standards for CPD and the standards for education and training are available to you as links to click through so that you can remember that wherever you work you re judged as a health professional by the HCPC and its them who will consider whether your practice meets or falls short of the relevant standards. CQ Live sets out the guidance to support the regulation and to function within the legislative frameworks that apply to us as health professionals; it s our professional guidance. We re expected, as autonomous professionals, to make informed and reasoned decisions about our practice to ensure we re meeting our regulatory standards. And we may need to seek out advice from a professional body, from employers, colleagues, education providers and others to ensure that we re meeting those standards and safeguarding

4 the wellbeing of those who use our services, which was paramount in the feedback you gave in the development stages. If you can do this and justify your decisions and your actions, then it s very likely you ll be meeting and maintaining the standards needed. So CQ Live is to support you in that decision making and reasoning process. If you look at this page, you will see that the blue box on the left-hand side sets out a number of topics: using CQ Live, hot topics, CQ Live scenarios, the 10 areas of standards that relate directly back to the HCPC and then the resources A-Z and the link for how to get involved. The user guide is exactly what it says; it takes you through how you can use CQ Live in a variety of ways. The hot topics are issues that are especially pertinent for you. They will change over time. They ll reflect the pressures, the demands and issues which challenge us as a profession. We are our own community of practice, working in an ever-changing health, education and social care landscape, so we are our own resource of good practice, we support each other and we innovate. The next label is the CQ Live scenarios, and these are case studies developed from ideas that you ve brought us, which will help you work through and stimulate your own thinking, your development needs, around how you can live the standards. We re going to look at one of these in just a moment. Each scenario is available as a working document; you can download it as a PDF. You could use it as a team tool. And it contains sections for you to think about, your own critical thinking on the topic, next steps, and then the prompts that will take you to the different resources and guidance. The next screenshot takes you into the CQ Live scenarios. In essence, it s a CPD resource. It takes a problem that arises from everyday working practice and asks you to think about what you need to critique, what steps to take. And you can use it in a variety of ways. Some of these were generated last year at the National Conference, and the topics groups there provided some very innovative and creative thinking around these areas. They re very much a reflective prompt for you to think about your practice and to support your critical reflective thinking and to help you by signposting you to relevant material, professional guidance and other resources. They do link to clinical guidelines, but you will need to source those through the clinical guidelines section of the website. The sorts of topics we ve looked at in these scenarios include confidentiality, delegating effectively, the use of social media, supervision, being an expert witness and many others. We invite all Hubs and CENs to hold a session at their next relevant meeting looking at the CQ Live scenarios to help you share your experiences around the subjects that you re encountering in your professional life to help you understand the HCPC standards and then the national frameworks and structures within which they work and how they re applied to their own practice. We invite you to explore the CQ Live site together and collate some feedback which you can send back to us. Doing this, you ll be carrying out some quality CPD. Once you ve completed any of the scenarios, whether as an individual or in a team, you can update your CPD diary and you can send your feedback in to us at college. So now let s have a look at one of the scenarios. So imagine you ve clicked on that link and you ve clicked on the scenario that says, you ve just started a new job and you re not sure what records to keep. So this topic is

5 a perennial question. Over the years, record keeping has changed. We use a variety of methods paper, electronic different systems and different organisations. We have many more electronic tools to record, store data. We re transferring data in increasingly diverse ways. It s important to remember that, wherever we work, it s the HCPC standards that guide us. There is, additionally, legislation that we must be aware of. If you work for a large employer, they might have training around the area of legislation and their own policies and protocols. But we come back to that, as health professionals, we abide by the HCPC standards, and these apply regardless of the context in which you work. So you have this scenario to think about. You ll be thinking about it in terms of the standards, what colleges your professional body provides in the way of guidance and resources, local, national policies and legislation and your employment policies, whether that s a large employer or your own policies if you re practising independently. The CQ Live scenario endeavours to take you through a thinking process to help you with that. So you click on record keeping as number 10 in the professional guidance. And immediately you are taken to a screen that shows you where you can link to the relevant HCPC documentation and also there are links there for RCSLT guidance to support you and then another link to take you to the specific RCSLT resources. And bear in mind that these may cover a number of different areas depending upon your question. You click on HCPC standards and here, on this screen, you can see this tells you what you need to do. This is what the HCPC expect of you. It sets out the standards from the conduct performance and ethics code, the standards of proficiency. So it s very, very clear; this is the set of standards by which you will be judged. And record keeping is something that comes up at the HCPC from time to time to be looked at in terms of how different professionals are managing it. So it s always worth starting with what is absolutely a must. And it s quite clear there; the guidance about what you need to do is very clear and it will apply wherever you re working. So you ve familiarised yourself with what is absolutely required. Then, you click through to have a look at the guidance from us, your own professional body, guidance which you ve contributed to and which is informed by the speech and language therapy community. So there are a set of statements there, all of which link back to the HCPC standards, but they give you some very clear guidance about what is expected. And there are a number of ways in which you might choose to use those statements. You could use them perhaps as an audit. You could use them to inform writing a policy if you re a small or independent practitioner. There is guidance there to support you to live the HCPC standards and if you can apply those in your day-to-day work then it s very likely that you ll be meeting what is required. They re there to underpin the implementation of the HCPC standards. You click through then to have a look at what the resources are. And you see that there are actually many different resources there that relate to record keeping in a variety of ways. I'm really pleased to say that, today, the guidance about information governance is now live. And if you were to click on the resources A-Z you would find that there are a variety of tools there that you can use to find your way about different ideas around information governance. And they include things like that national legislation, so that would take you to issues like the Data Protection Act. It would take you to information about confidentiality. It would take you to key people, key organisations that might be helpful for you. So that might be something that, after this webinar, you want to go away and explore.

6 Going back now to the actual slide show, you ve clicked through and you ve had a look at all those different resources perhaps you ve discussed them in supervision session or in a group scenario. And what you re going to do now, as a new speech and language therapist in your job, is you re going to find out from your employer about what their record keeping policies are. If you re self-employed, you re going to think about whether you have an appropriate policy, whether you need to develop one. You can use the resources to check that what you are doing aligns with the HCPC standards and CQ Live will signpost you to all sorts of national frameworks, guidance, resources, documentation that will inform your thinking. And you can use this to start a conversation with your employer, with your team. And, again, if you are self-employed or working independently, you can use this to inform how you develop your policies, your protocols. As I said, you can download the clinical scenarios, the CQ Live scenarios. And there are many more examples on there which you might want to browse through that will take you through some of the contemporary issues we all face with the use of social media, that will take you through some of the challenging conversations we might have to have about managing our caseload and discharging children, adults, about the clinical reasoning, the clinical decision making. I hope that s given you some insight into how the CQ Live pages operate, starting with the HCPC standards and working through the guidance and then onto the resources. And that you ll be able to have a good look around all the different pages and start to use them as of now. I will now hand back, I think, to Kamini because we ve got time for some questions. We had some coming in, I think, but also any more that came in before today. Okay, thank you very much to both Maria and Penny. And, as Penny said, we did have some questions that were submitted prior to the webinar. And I'm going to use those to kick us off. And, of course, if people who are listening in would like to pose a question to the panellists, please do use the Q&A button to submit your question. So one of the questions that we had submitted prior to the webinar was: Will CQ Live include the information from What Works? And What Works has been set up by the Communication Trust. So the question is: Will it include information from What Works to support us with our much needed evidence base for commissioners? So, Maria, what are your thoughts on that? Maria Luscombe Hello. Well, my thoughts were, first of all, that CQ Live are dealing with our standards, but there will be other sections of the website which will certainly refer to and point us to research. The clinical pages would point us to various clinical guidelines and standards around specific groups of patient groups, or perhaps working in schools, or whatever. So it will point us through to other resources that are available. And I do know that, certainly, the What Works website will be signposted as part of the children s work that we re doing. Thank you very much, Maria. Now, a question for Penny. I think you touched on this a little bit, but specific question: Does the guidance reflect the changing nature of digital working in healthcare? For example, use of social media, Skype, etc.

7 Penny Hodgkinson Thank you, Kamini. Yes, this was very topical and was certainly one that came up at the conference last year. And some of our CQ Live scenarios do actually deal with issues like YouTube, use of Facebook and other social media. Specific guidance has been developed for the use of telehealth apps, social media and this will be available on the CQ Live site by the end of June It s also worth mentioning that there is guidance around social media usage on the HCPC website and, indeed, today I think they opened a consultation on the use of social media. So look out for detailed guidance to support the HCPC standards that will be coming by the end of June Thank you, Penny. Now, we ve got a question from one of the listeners. She said: Hello, I am sat with my SLT colleagues and we have a question. Are there any minimum standards in CQ Live, e.g. supervision, that we could use for discussion with managers? I'm not sure if we ve got to that point of development. Any thoughts on that? Maria Luscombe I think we have our specific guidance, certainly, for newly qualified practitioners and the current guidance around supervision is being revised as we speak. It will be one of the guidelines produced. Penny Hodgkinson I think it s important to remember that the standards come from the HCPC and the guidance that our professional body gives us are in addition to the standards. So, firstly, check the standards in the HCPC around supervision, which it certainly is there. And then there will be some guidance, so it s in the process, I think, of being finally peer reviewed. But there will be some professional guidance that you can use to talk to your managers or others around what is required. But always refer managers back to the HCPC and then the professional guidance from the Royal College in addition to that. Thank you. Thank you very much, and I hope that that s helped to answer that question. We have had a number of questions about the fact that in CQ3 there were different sections and categories. And I think Maria has explained that we ve decoupled CQ3 into what actually its core business is, which is supporting our members to meet the standards set by the HCPC and the fact that a lot of the clinical elements of work are now sitting elsewhere in the website. So I hope that we ve also answered another question that was submitted prior to the webinar on that particular topic. I'm not seeing any other questions being submitted at the moment. I ll give those who are listening another few minutes to just think about a few questions. We ve got another question that s come in. I understand that CQ Live will be updated regularly to reflect current policies, etc. Will practitioners be sent alerts about the updates or notifications? I think, in response to that, yes, we will be looking at ways of alerting our members when new information goes up and, as Maria said, it is a living document; we will be thinking about how we communicate to our members when changes are made.

8 There s another question which is that some of the guidance within CQ3 regarding responsibilities around assessment intervention and perhaps, most relevantly at times, when to cease therapy. Will there be further support in these areas? I think that links back to what I was saying earlier about some of the guidance with respect to clinical interventions are going to be elsewhere. We do have some clinical webpages already on the website and we re looking at how we can update our clinical guidelines. So we hope that the clinical webpages will be somewhere where you can start. We ve got another question which is around whether the RCSLT website search function will link to items within CQ Live. I think the answer is yes, that s what we re hoping that it will do. We know that the website needs updating and that s something else that we re in the process of doing, but the current search button should help you to do that. There s a question around when will information guidance for supervision be published approximately? So it s a follow-up to the question that was asked earlier. I'm not sure if we know the exact timeframe for that. But, again, if we re not sure on the webinar, because we have a plan of work, we will be responding to some of these questions after the webinar and we ll be able to let you know. So another question about how the content from CQ3 is going to be made more easily accessible to people who are starting out in their SLT journey. I hope that Penny has talked to you a little bit about the navigation and how you can find your way through it. Penny, do you want to talk a little bit more about that? Penny Hodgkinson Thank you, Kamini. Once you re registered as a member of college, whether that s as a student member or as a practitioner member, then you will have access to CQ Live. CQ3 has been archived. So CQ Live will be available and accessible to anybody who is registered as a member with college, whether a student or a practitioner. I'm not entirely clear whether the question is about CQ3 or CQ Live. Is it that CQ3 is going to be archived in some way? I don t think that was quite clear from the question. But I think basically I'm assuming that somebody is using CQ3 instead of CQ Live. I think people are talking about the different conditions which were in CQ3 and not now in CQ Live. Again, we have responded to that question already, which is that those clinical areas such as dysphagia or the other clinical areas that might have been in CQ3 or were in CQ3 are now elsewhere on the website. As we ve said, CQ Live is about supporting members to adhere to the standards set by the HCPC. CQ3 was about professional standards, but actually did contain a lot of other content which really needs to sit in other elements of the website so that there is particular better interlinkages with the research centre of the website. So if you haven t seen that, please have a look. I can see that somebody s concerned about the fact that clinical resources are not very searchable. As I said earlier, we ve very aware that our current website, it is difficult to search for certain things. We are in the process of looking to see how we can update it. If you have particular issues around trying to find content on the website, do ring up our Information Manager and he will support you. But the first place might be to start would be to look at the clinical webpages side and also to look on the research centre.

9 I think those are most of the questions. There are similar issues that have arisen which was about specific client groups and service provision. Okay, so we are now getting to the point where I think we ve probably covered most of the questions. And, as I said, if there are any elements where we haven t been able to respond to your question as part of the webinar we ll be responding afterwards. And we will, hopefully, be able to get the recording onto our website in about a week. So we do encourage you to share this with others and to start using CQ Live as a living resource. And, as Maria was saying, to volunteer to get involved because this is about professional consensus, so it s very important that, as a community of practice, everybody s involved where they can be. Now, thank you again to our speakers, Maria and Penny, and to all of you for listening in. We ve had over 80 people listen in, so that s brilliant. Thanks very much, bye.