My Home Life
My Home Life is an evidence based program developed in the United Kingdom.
The program originated from a review of high performing homes across the UK and analysis to determine why some homes performed significantly better than others.
The analysis identified a series of common themes that differentiated homes that performed well.
- Developing Best Practice Together – skills to build community, collaboration and partnership
- Focusing on relationships – care is a relationship, not a transaction or task, building the capacity to see and support the individual in a way that is meaningful
- Being appreciative – development and focusing on what is possible, what’s working well and what’s most important
- Having Caring Conversations – compassionate communication, focusing on honesty, dignity and recognition of the inherent value and individuality of people
One of the more remarkable aspects of My Home Life is that work did not just stop at identifying these themes. Focused work on developing a toolset and leadership development program followed to reliably and consistently transfer this skill set to allow development of high quality care to be shared across the sector. A key part of the program is the focus on self-reflection and building personal skill sets. Many participants report learning about themselves and developing greater ability to connect with, understand and support others.
Development in Australia
In 2017 the Innovation Hub worked with My Home Life UK to bring the team to Australia and train a facilitation team to deliver the leadership development program in Australia. Further training in 2024 renewed the facilitation team’s skills incorporating developments across the international network and increased our capacity to deliver the program with new facilitators.
The My Home Life Leadership Program
The leadership program uses an innovative approach to learning, combining direct experience of the toolset, application of the tools with mentoring and support and progressing to action learning sets where the new skills are applied in the workplace with support from professional peers and My Home Life Facilitators.
The program is unique in that it is developed specifically for leadership in the Care Sector and empowers leaders to actively and consciously cultivate positive cultures of care both with their team and with the community of older people and their loved ones.
The Program typically consists of 4 days over a couple of weeks to discover and experience the principles. This is followed by 6 months of action learning to apply these principles in their work context. With over two hundred Care Specific tools to support the practitioner to connect with Older Australians, their families and loved ones, coworkers and managers to find individualised solutions that change the experience of care.
Case Study
A great example of the implementation of My Home Life is the Repatriation Neuro-Behaviourial Unit. Supporting people with severe symptoms of Dementia that can not be well supporting in traditional care the RNBU is a specialist unit developed to support with client group.
The unit trained in My Home Life Leadership Development Program in 2020 and has worked on tuning the approach to their client group with great success. Winner of a Southern Adelaide Local Health Network Innovation Award for their use of language to support positive cultures of care the unit is recognised as a leading example of care. Tasmania Health, seeing the performance of the RNBU has adopted My Home Life for their olders persons specialists mental health unit.
