Learning to Care: The Care Home Staff Guide

Sue Brand is Managing Director of RDB Star Rating. She trained and qualified at the Middlesex Hospital in London and started the Pembroke Group, her own group of care homes, in the 1970s. She has always been committed to 'quality care' , pioneering the first training videos and books designed for the care sector 1987. She was Chair of East Sussex National Care Association and Brighton and Hove National Care Homes Association from 1992 to 2000, when the care sector was in crisis. To address the serious issues facing the care sector at that time, she founded the RDB Star Rating System. Sue has always been passionate about residents being treated with dignity and respect and has spent many years campaigning to achieve this. She is very focused and highly tenacious and uses her significant experience, her intellectual abilities, and interpersonal skills to ensure that her objectives for quality care are reached and surpassed. Current ActivitiesoFellow of the Royal Society of Arts oFounder member of National Skills AcademyoRepresents Care England on the UKAS Policy Advisory CounciloMember on the drafting panel of British Standards Institute (BSI) for Social CareoMember of Royal Society of Medicine oTrustee of the National Dignity Council oBoard member of the Quality Care Campaign oMember of HASCAF (Health & Social Care Accreditation Forum) oCranfield Alumni oCommon Purpose Alumni

All of us who are concerned with providing the highest quality of care for the elderly are also concerned about how we can ensure that proper training is given to those to whom that care is entrusted. We have reviewed the [RDB Training] package and believe it has a major contribution to make by providing care home managers and staff with a comprehensive range of basic skills critical to giving elderly people the quality of care which we would like to see become standard in this country.