The purpose of continuing professional development is to improve the quality of care that service users receive from health and social care practitioners. Care organizations and professional care workers have a ‘duty of care’ to service users to provide them with the best quality of care. Individuals have the right to choose the way they will be treated and receive a high standard of service. Under the Skills for Care workforce development strategy Capable, Confident, Skilled (2011), care workforce not only need to become more capable, skilled, responsive, well-trained and empowered, but must continually review and improve their skills. This is to deliver the seven principals outlined in government’s Vision for Adult Social Care: Capable communities and active citizens (2010)-Prevention, Personalization, Partnership, Plurality, Protection, Productivity, People. The government, employers and individuals working in the social care setting need to work in partnership and share responsibilities to ensure that all health workers are continually reviewing and updating their knowledge, skills and understanding so they would meet the constantly changing demands of service users. Different people have different preferences and abilities in regards to improving knowledge. And by understanding that other people can have quite different learning preferences and finding out what they are, I am able to communicate effectively.
This is very important for my role as a manager as learning and developing and sharing with my colleagues is an important part of my job. There are many theories for learning styles but the most popular is David Kolb’s model of learning. His model is based on a cycle including active and passive learning and according to him learning is the process where knowledge is created through transformation of experience. Kolb’s cycle identifies how people prefer to learn:
