Life Planning training is designed to give multi-disciplinary teams in inpatient settings the knowledge and skills to create Life Plans alongside the people they are working with to help create a vision for a good life and good support in the community. 

Life Plans can help to inform the development of a service specification for care, support and accommodation, as well as articulating what a good life means to the person in terms of their aspirations, hopes and goals for the future.

A Life Plan is a Person Centred document which is written from the focus person’s own perspective and helps professionals, practitioners, housing and support providers understand how to build a truly person-centred pathway towards life in the community.

Life Plans can help to form an outline for discussion in Care (Education) and Treatment Reviews (C(E)TRs), and 117 discharge planning meetings.

The content of the training covers the following learning outcomes:

• What are Life Plans?
• How can Life Plans be used in the development of discharge plans and community support?
• How do Life Plans link with Personalised Care and Support Plans? (PCSP)
• Person Centred Planning tools and conversations for the development of the Life Plan

The training is a 1 day classroom-based course for up to 20 learners, and includes a combination of theoretical content and practical sessions to experience and embed understanding of Life Planning as an approach to helping people live good lives outside of hospital settings.

Training content includes:

• Understanding the history and context of Transforming Care/Building the Right Support, including the legal frameworks and values which uphold this
• Effective conversational and listening styles that support Self Directed Support approaches, which underpin Life Planning
• An introduction to a range of ways to record the information that is meaningful for the person before completing the statutory and template based paper work
• How to adopt consideration for what is possible rather than what is available
• How to open up a conversation around what makes sense to the person and what would achieve a good life and recognise how to support the achievement of this
• An opening up of thinking around the resources available to a person and effective approaches to exploring and mapping this when working with a person and their network of support
• Developing the Life Plan using the information gathered
• Ensuring the Life Plan is an active document, owned by the person and is a central element of discharge planning

The approach to training will recognise the expertise already existing within the team members attending the training. We facilitate active engagement in finding the answer to the overall challenge of achieving Self Directed Support and a Good Life, as defined in a person’s Life Plan, for those who are currently receiving care in a hospital setting.

There will be a combination of facilitated conversations, additional resources for self-directed learning, solution focused workshop discussions & activities.