Effective communication with your support workers is essential.
It helps to uphold your rights, whether you’re a person with a disability or care for someone with a disability. Establishing clear communication gives you choice and control. It also gives you the ability to make decisions about your or your loved one’s life.
Communication also enables your disability support workers to provide the right level of support for you or a loved one. It can mean you can clearly express yourself and your needs. It can also help your support workers or family members to:
Build and sustain relationships with you, your loved ones and other support workers
Understand what you’re thinking and feeling
Provide support workers with all the important information you need for daily activities
Better interpret your needs if you or a loved one is non-verbal
Act with sensitivity and respond appropriately to meet your needs
In contrast, ineffective communication can be a significant barrier to getting the right care and support. Without the right support it can be difficult for you to reach your goals.
Setting Communication Expectations with Support Workers
It's important to establish how you’ll communicate with support workers at the beginning of your relationship. This can help to ensure everyone understands the expectations around communication. And why it’s so important to help build a trusting relationship.
Consider setting some clear expectations around:
what channels you'll use to communicate
how often you’ll communicate
the type of information you’ll communicate
any specific expectations - for example, how quickly you expect a response from your support worker or vice versa
Choosing the Right Communication Channel
Choosing the right channel to communicate can be an important consideration. It can be hard to keep track of meaningful conversations with your support team if you're managing multiple contact systems. For example, email, SMS or various provider platforms. Using many platforms can make it hard to locate important information or documents that may be buried deep in your messages.
That’s why we have a Chat feature within the Ability8 platform. The Chat feature offers one-on-one chats and group conversations. You can contact an individual support worker or your entire team so everyone can see your discussion. Allowing you to share relevant and valuable information in real time.
With Chat, you can send instant messages and securely share documents and photos. You can chat with anyone you've provided access to your Ability8 portal. Such as support workers, family and friends.
Ability8 makes keeping on top of your communications easy by keeping everything in one place. If you're already a customer of Ability8 it's easy to start a chat within the app:
In the menu bar, select the Chat icon
Select the New Chat button
Select who you want to chat with
Select Start a Chat
Type in your message
Select the Send icon
If you haven't tried Ability8 organise your free 30-day trial today! Our free trial is available on each of our plans.
Our plans offer a range of tools and capabilities, from simple succession planning to managing staff and issuing payslips.
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