Sherbutt House Residential and Home Care Services

Clients Rights

We place the rights of clients at the forefront of our philosophy of care. We seek to advance these rights in all aspects of the environment and the services we provide and to encourage our clients to exercise their rights to the full.

Privacy

We recognise that life in a communal setting and the need to accept help with personal tasks are inherently invasive of a clients ability to enjoy the pleasure of being alone and undisturbed. We therefore, strive to retain as much privacy as possible for our clients in the following ways:

1. Giving help in intimate situations as discreetly as possible.
2. Helping clients to furnish and equip their rooms in their own style and to use them as much as they wish for leisure, meals and entertaining.
3. Offering a range of locations around the organisation for clients to be alone or with selected others.
4. Providing locks on client storage space, bedrooms and other rooms in which clients need at times to be interrupted.
5. Guaranteeing clients' privacy when using the telephone, opening and reading post and communicating with friends, relatives or advisors.
   Ensuring the confidentiality of information the organisation holds about clients.

Dignity

Disabilities quickly undermine dignity, so we try to preserve respect for our clients intrinsic value in the following ways:

1. Treating each client as a special and valued individual.
2. Helping clients to present themselves to others as they would wish, through their own clothing, their personal appearance and their behaviour in public.
3. Offering a range of activities, which enables each client to express themselves as a unique individual.
4. Tackling the stigma from which our clients may suffer through age, disability or status.
5. Compensating for the effects of disabilities, which clients may experience on their communication, physical functioning, mobility or appearance.

Independence

We are aware that our clients have given up a good deal of their independence in entering a group living situation. We regard it as all the more important to foster our clients remaining opportunities, to think and act without reference to another person in the following ways:

1. Providing as tactfully as possible human or technical assistance when it is needed.
2. Maximising the abilities our clients retain for self-care, for independent interaction with others and for carrying out the tasks of daily living unaided.
3. Helping clients take reasonable and fully thought-out risks.
4. Promoting possibilities for clients to establish and retain contacts beyond the home.
5. Using any form of restraint on clients only in situations of urgency, when it is essential for their own safety or the safety of others.
6. Encouraging clients to have access to and contribute to the records of their own care.

Security

We aim to provide an environment and structure of support which responds to the need for security in the following ways:

1. Offering assistance with tasks and in situations that would be otherwise be perilous for clients.
2. Protecting clients from all forms of abuse and from all possible abusers.
3. Providing readily accessible channels for dealing with complaints by clients.
4. Creating an atmosphere in the organisation which clients experience as open, positive and inclusive.

Civil Rights

Having disabilities and residing in a home or supported living environment, can all act to deprive our clients their rights as citizens. We therefore, work to maintain our clients place in society, fully participating and benefiting citizens in the following ways:

1. Ensuring that clients have the opportunity to vote in elections and to brief themselves fully on their democratic options.
2. Preserving for clients full and equal access to all elements of the National Health Service.
3. Helping clients to claim all appropriate welfare benefits and social services.
4. Assisting clients access to public services such as libraries, further education and life long learning.
5. Facilitating clients in contributing to society through volunteering, helping each other and taking on roles, involving responsibility within and beyond the organisation.

Choice

We aim to help clients exercise the opportunity to select from a range of options in all aspects of their lives, in the following ways:

1. Providing meals which enable clients as far as possible to decide for themselves where, when and with whom they consume food and drink of their choice.
2. Offering clients a wide range of leisure activities from which to chose.
3. Enabling clients to manage their own time and not be dictated to by set communal timetables.
4. Avoiding wherever possible treating clients as a homogeneous group.
5. Respecting individual, unusual or eccentric behaviour in our clients.
6. Retaining maximum flexibility in the routines, of the daily life of the organisation.

Fulfilment

We want to help our clients to realise personal aspirations and abilities in all aspects of their lives. We seek to assist this in the following ways:

1. Informing ourselves as fully as each client wishes, about their individual histories and characteristics.
2. Providing a range of leisure and recreational activities to suit the tastes and abilities of all clients and to stimulate participation.
3. Responding appropriately to the personal, intellectual, artistic and spiritual values and practices of every client.
4. Respecting our clients' religious, ethnic and cultural diversity.
5. Helping our clients to maintain existing contacts and to make new liaisons, friendships and personal or sexual relationships if they wish.
6. Attempting always to listen and attend promptly to any clients desire to communicate, at whatever level.

Quality Care

We wish to provide the highest quality of care and to do this we give priority to a number of areas relating to the operation of the organisation and the services we provide.