The strengths-based care critical review tool from SCIE focuses on nine critical domains to help people working in adult care, and support them, to understand where they are now and what they need to consider to make progress.

Strengths-based ways of working (or strengths-based approaches) focus on identifying the strengths, or assets, and the needs and difficulties of people who draw on services, their carers and families as well as communities in which people live. The Care Act 2014 specifically states to ‘consider the person’s own strengths and capabilities, and what support might be available from their wider support network or within the community’.

“A strengths-based approach to care, support and inclusion says let’s look first at what people can do with their skills and their resources – and what can the people around them do in their relationships and their communities. People need to be seen as more than just their care needs – they need to be experts and in charge of their own lives.” Alex Fox, CEO Shared Lives

What are the benefits of strengths-based ways of working?

• To enhance health, wellbeing, and resilience
• To reduce long-term pressures on higher-cost health, care, and support services
• To enable people to participate in and benefit from community resources and activities.

To ensure that any specific model or approach to strengths-based approaches achieves the desired outcomes, the right conditions across the whole service and the wider system need to be created. This tool from SCIE deliberately focuses on how organisations and systems are progressing on creating the conditions which foster strengths-based practice.

The strengths-based auditing tool focuses on these 9 critical domains:

• Develop a strengths-based vision and framework
• Leading a strengths-based approach
• Developing a strengths-based approach to commissioning
• Working in partnership
• Effective and enabling systems, processes, and information
• Delivering to a high standard and quality
• Co-producing with people who draw on services and carers
• Developing the skills and capabilities of the workforce
• Understanding and measuring impact

Under each domain it describes:

• What good practice looks like
• Why it is important
• Key questions to consider
• Examples of good practice
• Useful resources – other helpful tools

Click here to read more about SCIE’s critical review tool and learn how you could implement this in your organisation or service.

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