Starting a new social care project is one of the great privileges of my role as an Area Manager.
When you take over an area, as I did in February when MacIntyre gave me the opportunity to manage the Hampshire Area, most often you will inherit the services for which you are responsible and the managers and support staff that make those services work but every once in a while you get to do something really special: you get to start a brand new service which, hopefully, will thrive and offer the chance of a better life for the people who will live there. In the last few months we have been doing exactly that in the New Milton area of the New Forest where we will be opening a new service at the end of August.
Hampshire Authority chose MacIntyre to take on their newest project, a block of 18 new build flats catered toward young adults with learning disabilities who would be leaving education and possibly leaving home for the first time to start their own adventure into adulthood and having their own tenancies.
It was really important to Hampshire authority and to us that these flats could be available to those people who might not always be the ‘right fit’ for many supported living services and shared lives options and that by working together with prospective tenants, their families and their social workers we could build on the initial designs for these flats and make them personalised to the needs of those young people who might otherwise be excluded from being able to live there.
This is where the real work comes in! Our start up manager Vicky Nixon and our Front Line Manager for the service Paul Abbott meet with all the prospective tenants for the service and with their families and other people important to them to get an idea of the challenges the young person might face living independently for the first time.
Then we have to consider the time scales involved for that person including when they need to move and what a really positive transition would look like for them.
Then it’s up to us to work with Hampshire to come up with the right adaptations, the right support solutions and the right timescales to enable us to offer the person a chance to move forward with their lives and take a big first step on the path to independent living.
We hope to check back in with Great Interactions Blog later in the year where hopefully we can update you all on how we did with our start up and what the successes and challenges have been.
Until then, wish us luck with our first steps into a new MacIntyre adventure.
Tristan Mabey
Area Manager, Hampshire
