Duty of Care Training
Duty of care is a legal term that carries the requirement of putting procedures and systems in place. A duty of care, in a care setting, is the requirement that all health and social care professionals and organisations providing health and care services must put the interests of service users first, ensuring the safeguarding of vulnerable adults and children. Working in the health and social care sector involves working with lots of different people with a variety of needs dependencies, backgrounds and wishes.
A duty of care is a legal requirement, which means you can’t choose whether to help someone in need or not. The duty of care starts as soon as the person is accepted as a service user and starts to receive your help and support. The Code of Practice states that as a social service worker, you must promote the independence of service users while protecting them as far as possible from danger or harm
Safeguarding
You will learn the parallels between duty of care and safeguarding, in a care setting. The concept of safeguarding whether we’re talking about children or vulnerable adults is broader than protection. Safeguarding is about keeping children or vulnerable adults safe from any sort of harm, whether illness, injury or abuse.
This means all agencies and families working together and taking responsibility for the safety of children and vulnerable adults, whether by promoting health and preventing accidents are protecting children and vulnerable adults who’ve been abused.
The course looks at the principles inside the framework of The Children’s Act, 1989 to help those who work in care recognise their legal responsibilities in this setting. Children and young people are often cared for in special establishments rather than their home as it’s common that they’re in care because problems within the home. Any person in charge of all working with children and young people in any capacity is considered both legally and morally to owe them a duty of care.
Training
It’s obvious that care professionals owe a duty of care to children and vulnerable adults that they are charged with. Trained carers are seen by their charges as experts, although this varies depending on the level and extent of their training and qualifications.
While it is important to maintain the level of knowledge and skills necessary for your job, but also to make sure that you don’t work beyond that level. The course suggests training that may help a carer be more effective and enable them to better fulfil their duty of care to service users as part of your continuing professional development.
Dilemmas and Conflict
One of the key features of the social care workers job is to respect and protect the service users rights and interests and to promote their independence. At the same time, your duty of care also involves protecting the service user from harm. So we’ll explain how this can sometimes lead to dilemmas and how best to deal with them. This includes how to write a dilemma incident report, and where to go for advice on how to resolve the situation.
In this part of the course we use a fictitious example of a care resident who is recovering from severe bronchitis and is demanding to smoke a cigarette. The dilemma created by this is that despite the care resident being an adult, who is entitled to make his own decisions – his decision has repercussions that could be harmful to him and other residents, along with being in conflict with the rules of the care home.
Complaints and Whistleblowing
An important aspect of this course is knowing the rules around whistleblowing and understanding what to do when you see practices that appear to go against the best interests of service users. Most organisations will have a whistleblowing policy, which provides you with guidelines on how to address the issue.
The course also looks at complaints procedures and how care workers should handle complaints, the procedures that should be followed and who to refer them to
For full information on social care and duty of care UK, the NHS have produced Social Care and Support Guide
| Course Content | Module |
| The course structure | 1 |
| The implications of duty of care | 2 |
| How duty of care affects your work | 3 |
| Duty of care dilemmas | 4 |
| Resolving dilemmas: Support and advice | 5 |
| How to respond to complaints | 6 |
Course Assessment
Online assessment for this duty of care uk training is carried out by a series of multiple choice questions. Candidates must answer 70% of the questions correctly to pass each module. We advise you to complete each module and answer the question before moving on to the next module. This provides a better learning experience because you will need to have knowledge from earlier modules to understand some of the material in the later modules. For those who complete the course successfully, a PDF certificate of the award is sent directly to your inbox. Hard copies of the award are available on request. The course takes 50 minutes of training to complete. This is course content only and does not cover the time it takes to answer questions.
Related courses to Duty of Care UK Training includes:
Safeguarding Adults
Person Centred Care