Contextual and individual barriers to providing practice leadership by frontline managers in community services for adults with intellectual disabilities: A qualitative study

Background

As practice leaders, frontline managers observe staff working, provide feedback and use organisational structures to improve staff skills and focus on service-user quality of life. This qualitative study explored the experiences and barriers for frontline managers providing practice leadership to staff in community services for adults with learning disabilities.

Methods

Audio-recorded data was collected during semi-structured interviews with 14 frontline managers, transcribed and analysed using thematic analysis.

Findings

Three themes emerged reflecting participants' experiences of barriers to their work as practice leaders, focusing on stable staff teams, ‘admin’ and paperwork, and developing staff, each with sub-themes.

Conclusions

Results reflect existing research and suggest new challenges relating to progress in personalisation. Frontline managers experience barriers to providing practice leadership due to contextual and individual factors described in the themes. Successful implementation of policy initiatives, for example, Transforming Care requires further research on the impact, development and provision of practice leadership for support staff. should recognise these factors influencing frontline managers and ensure suitable policies and training to support practice leadership.

Accessible summary

Management for staff working with people with learning disabilities is important to help staff work well and support people to do the things they want to do.

Staff need managers who are around to watch them do their work and guide them to do as well as they can.

We asked managers, in Southern England how they worked with staff and what got in the way of them being around to watch staff and support them to feel confident do a better job.

Managers told us they have to spend too much time doing paperwork and staff are hard to recruit, leading to people with learning disabilities having lots of new different staff which makes it hard to develop good stable relationships.