John Green, General Manager of Camphill Devon

Camphill Devon has been supporting people with learning disabilities in Devon for over thirty-five years and provides care for over 60 people in supported living, residential care and day services. The organisation’s person-centred approach ensures that everyone is encouraged to live an active and fulfilling life, and to have as much choice and control as possible. Its aim is to support people to achieve the lifestyle they want to have, benefitting from a sense of community where people can support and be supported by others.

“Everything is based on strong values and we test ourselves against these,” explained John Green, General Manager of Camphill Devon. “Our recent Care Quality Commission report highlighted the emphasis we have on valuing people as individuals and stated that we have robust recruitment processes in place to ensure that suitable staff are employed’, which comes from our consistent monitoring and assessment of new initiatives in social care.

“For example, it was from studying Skills for Care’s projects that we came across Profiles4Care, which presented such a clear and simple way to work with values that we were immediately interested.”

Integrating Profiles4Care into the company has been smoothly and successfully championed by John and his team of managers, initially as an internal development project as well as a recruitment tool.

“The support we received from Profiles4Care was excellent, such as presenting at the seminar day where we could see the penny drop for everyone and the response was excellent as people started to see the possibilities it presented,” said John Green.

“In the early days, we found that by using the tool and reports we could assess someone’s values in under 15 minutes, something which used to take up to two hours to come to a similar conclusion.

“We also felt that the people in the organisation could gain a lot from it too as the ‘here and now’ of the organisation is all about them and this gives them an impartial viewpoint. We don’t appraise anyone against the reports they are purely for their benefit and they have welcomed them and are sharing the information.”

John also states that Profiles4Care has had a positive effect on how the company is viewed by candidates; “One of our new support workers commented recently that she’d worked in social care for eight years and was very impressed with Camphill Devon’s professional approach to recruitment, particularly the values based approach of using Profiles4Care. It made her think that we must value people, and that we valued her as a candidate, you can’t ask for a better first impression than that.”