HSA Australia's blog is brought to you this month by Amanda Jones.

Over the past year we've been working with the New South Wales Department of Human Services, Ageing, Disability and Home Care, to put together a range of templates and examples to accompany their new Lifestyle Planning Policy for Accommodation and Respite Services. The templates and examples will help staff to apply person centred thinking in their daily work as well as contributing to the plans they ultimately develop alongside the people they support. In addition to person centred thinking skills, there are guidelines for facilitating meetings and implementing plans.

In the last two days there have been 3 concurrent learning workshops running in regions across the state to begin the process of implementing the policy, over 200 staff in total were working on the same concepts in different locations but at the same time. The focus of the two days was to give people a starting point for the planning policy on communication and information gathering. People were able to look at the different tools and examples, have a go at some for themselves, and reflect on how the tools could help as they start to plan with one person that they support. The groups will come back together in a couple of months to reflect on their learning, share stories and to look at further steps to take as they move through the process of developing a plan. The action learning phase in between each workshop will hopefully help people feel connected and supported as they navigate their way through a different way of working with people.

One of the highlights for me was watching people develop a poster in groups that represented what they felt was best practice and worst practice for gathering information and developing plans. There were some really great reflections on past experiences and a real sense of excitement and hope for the future.

Something that I have been reminded of over the last couple of days is how exciting yet overwhelming the concept of person centred approaches can be for people. I appreciated people's honesty as they spoke with enthusiasm about planning and holding conversations differently, but also expressed anxiety about "what if we get it wrong, there are so many ways of doing this."  Supporting the anxiety along with the excitement is nothing new to us in moving towards cultural change, however it is heartening to be involved in an approach that is creating such deliberate space for people to express how they are going.