What does facilitating or enhancing communication actually mean for a Family Council?
by Family Councils Ontario
Each Family Council is unique and charts its own course in terms of its planning and operations. There are, however, four overarching goals that are common to all Councils. Support, communication, education, and advocacy are the four goals outlined in FCO’s Guide to Starting and Maintaining a Family Council (“guide.”) This blog will take a look at the second goal of communication and highlight aspects of this goal that we have learned since we published the guide.
The guide states that a Council assists in facilitating and enhancing communication between families, staff and residents and sets out a few examples. But what does facilitating or enhancing communication actually mean for a Family Council? Over the years we have learned some tips and want to share and highlight them.
The role of a Staff Assistant
Upon request of the Council, the long-term care home must provide an assistant to the Council who can help communicate and liaise between the Council and the staff and administration of the home. The liaison role is an important function of the assistant. A formal meaning of liaison is “to aid in communication or cooperation which facilitates a close working relationship between people or organizations.” This aspect of the staff assistant role helps support the Council’s work to facilitate communication.
Family Council assistants attend meetings as requested by the Council but are not members of a Council. They do not take minutes or take on leadership roles but support and encourage emerging leadership within the families who are Council members. This support enables the Council to fulfill their mission and achieve their goals.
Attendance of the assistant at Council meetings is entirely up to the Council members to decide. The Council can decide if, when and for what reason assistants attend. Sometimes staff are asked to attend for a specific time in the meeting, for example, for the first or last half hour, to speak to questions the Council may have about the home. Sometimes assistants are asked to attend every second meeting rather than every meeting and in some cases assistants only attend when specifically invited. The Council can outline what they prefer and the home has a responsibility to honor the Council’s request.
Some Councils have found it very important to have time to speak together without staff present so they can share in confidence, questions, and concerns and get support from members. This allows the members to speak freely which may be compromised if staff are present.
The Council can ask the Family Council assistant to take a question or an issue forward to the administration for them. The assistant can then support the Council through finding answers by reporting back to them at a subsequent meeting. When the Council and the assistant work together to find answers to questions or suggest solutions to a problem the more formal process of writing a complaint and expecting a response may not needed. The relationship between the assistant and the Council is an important one and needs to be fostered. Particularly in the case of Family Council assistants, the relationship is of primary importance.
Written complaints or recommendations to the home
Sometimes a Council may find that the issue they are concerned about is not being addressed and want a more formal way of connecting with the administration of the home. A written complaint may be necessary. In the event that a written complaint from the Family Council is needed the home has ten days upon receiving the submission to respond. We have found that in most cases issues can be solved with careful planning and working together without the need to submit a written complaint. Teamwork and good communication builds strong relationships and the stronger the relationship that the Council has with the home staff the easier it is to solve issues when they do occur.
How, when, why, and with whom a Council communicates has a huge impact on the Council’s effectiveness and the relationships with staff, residents, and other family members. Stay tuned for more on Council communication as we continue this series throughout 2019.
“Words are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively with words of encouragement, or destructively using words of despair. Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate and to humble.” Yehuda Berg