By Diya Ganguly
Tuesday, May 3, 2022
An interactive and engaging workshop was organised for CertHE in Skills for Workplace Health and Social Care Students on 25th April 2022 to demonstrate the social and clinical skills required to work and excel in healthcare occupational settings, and explore self-help mental health tools to support wellbeing.
The event was titled Managing Complex Client Behaviour and Critical Situations using the contemporary therapeutic approach of Solution-Focused Practice.
The trainers of the event, Greg Oberbeck and Ben Scott, walked the participants through the core founding principles of Solution Focused practice in order to help our students understand that the concepts of how we perceive individuals and what we hear from them have a proportional impact on how we follow up with the services we provide and the approach we follow.
Students had the opportunity to participate in various group activities, role-play exercises and even volunteer for a role-play-based one-to-one therapy skills demonstration with the trainers. Students were also shown real case videos from social and mental health work settings to grasp the complexity and skill sets required in such professions. This gave the students a platform to reflect on some of the ideas and methods of the Solution Focussed Approach and its applications for themselves, their teams as well as their service users!
Feedback from Students
'Thoroughly enjoyed and learned a lot in a comfortable environment. The style and the knowledge of the presenters were absolutely remarkable. The techniques demonstrated in the training will personally help me to get over some of my emotional and even physical pain. I hope to try and introduce it to others and can’t wait for the next part of the training where we’ll explore more SFP techniques. The workshop was an experience in itself and I’m glad our programme manager, Diya, organised this training for us. Thank you so much!' — (Student - CertHE Skills for the Workplace - Health & Social Care Term 3)
'A very informative and valuable training session. I really enjoyed the small group dynamics, and it was great to get the SFP techniques and know I can use it every day anywhere anytime for any critical problem' — (Student - CertHE Skills for the Workplace - Health & Social Care Term 2)
To sum up, this concluded an engrossing and thought-provoking session with our students, where they had the opportunity to experience and discuss the Solution-Focused Approach first hand in interacting with industry and subject matter experts. We hope to organise more such events for our students and tutors in the following terms.
Note: This initiative was part of the UWTSD's Students' Experience Enhancement Fund (SEEF).