Overview

The Lead Practitioner in Adult Care will guide and inspire team members to make positive differences to someone’s life when they are faced with physical, practical, social, emotional, psychological or intellectual challenges. They will have achieved a level of self-development to be recognised as a lead practitioner within the care team, contributing to promoting and sustaining a values-based culture at an operational level.  A Lead Practitioner has a greater depth of knowledge and expertise of particular conditions being experienced by the user of services. They will have specialist skills and knowledge in their area of responsibilities that will allow them to lead in areas such as care needs assessment, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, rehabilitation and enablement, telecare and assistive technology. They will be a coach and mentor to others and will have a role in assessing performance and quality of care delivery (extract from the Lead Practitioner in Adult Care standard).

The Level 4 Diploma in Adult Care qualification has been designed to align to the standard. The mandatory units cover core competencies whilst the optional units allow learners to choose from a variety of specialist areas to tailor the qualification to their needs, interests and to reflect the context of their work.

Potential job roles:

Learners can progress into employment in settings such as residential or nursing homes, domiciliary care, day centres, an individual’s own home or some clinical healthcare settings.

Learners can progress into a number of lead practitioner job roles within the adult care sector, such as:

• community care/support officer
• social care assessor
• care assessment officer
• social services officer
• brokerage worker
• rehabilitation and reablement assistant
• independence support assistant
• reablement support worker/officer
• telecare assistant
• assistive technology co-ordinator/officer