You are trusting us with someone you love. So it is fair to ask: how do we make sure the people looking after them actually know what they are doing?
Most care homes will tell you their staff are trained. That is the minimum. It is a legal requirement. It would be strange if they said otherwise.
We would rather show you exactly what our training looks like, who delivers it, what qualifications it leads to, and how we make sure nobody falls behind.
The mandatory training every team member completes
Every member of the Catherine House team completes a mandatory training programme through BrightSafe, which is part of the BrightHR platform we use to manage our people. This is not a box-ticking exercise. The courses are CPD accredited and RoSPA accredited, which means they meet nationally recognised standards for professional development and health and safety training.
Mandatory training covers the subjects you would expect: safeguarding, fire safety, infection control, health and safety, food hygiene, data protection, moving and handling, first aid. But the important thing is not just that the training exists. It is that every course completion is tracked, every certificate is recorded, and every renewal date is flagged before it lapses.
Laura, our Registered Manager, can tell you at any point exactly where every team member stands with their training. No digging through paper files. No hoping someone remembered to book their refresher. The system tracks it and flags it.
Going further: professional qualifications
Mandatory training keeps people safe. But it does not help people grow.
That is where SWATPro comes in. We use SWATPro to give our support workers access to accredited qualifications in health and social care, starting at Level 3. These are not short courses. They are proper qualifications that take months of study and practical assessment.
We also invested in our Registered Manager Laura’s development through SWATPro, supporting her through to Level 5. When your manager is actively developing her own practice, it sets the standard for the whole team.
Why does this matter to you? Because a team that is learning is a team that stays. High staff turnover is one of the biggest problems in residential care. People leave because they feel stuck. We would rather give them somewhere to go.
That is how you build a team that knows the people they support, not just the tasks on the rota.
Specialist and external training
Not everything can be learned online. Some skills need specialist input from people outside our organisation, and we actively seek that out.
We take advantage of training offered by the local authority, including specialist courses like oral hygiene care for people with additional needs. This matters because the people who live at Catherine House have specific support requirements, and generic training does not always cover what our team needs to know.
Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training
The Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training on Learning Disability and Autism is the training programme named after Oliver McGowan, whose death in 2016 exposed serious failures in how health and care professionals understood learning disabilities and autism.
We promote and support this training for every member of our team. It is not optional in our view. The people who live at Catherine House have learning disabilities. The team who support them need to understand what that means properly, not just at a textbook level, but in the real, everyday, practical sense that affects how someone experiences their morning routine, their mealtimes, their social life, and their choices.
What this means for you
If you are a family member looking at Catherine House, this is what sits behind the warm welcome and the clean kitchen and the friendly team. It is a training infrastructure that a provider of our size has no obligation to build. We built it anyway, because the people who live here deserve a team that is not just kind but properly equipped.
If you are a social worker assessing us as a provider, our training matrix is available upon request. Every course, every certificate, every renewal date. We do not need advance notice to look prepared. We just are.
If you are a commissioner, this is part of why Catherine House works. Low staff turnover, consistent relationships, a team that knows the people they support. That does not happen by accident. It happens because you invest in the people who do the work.
And if you are thinking about joining our team, this is what you are walking into. Not a place where you clock in, do your shift, and go home. A place where you can build a career from the ground up, supported every step of the way.