EMPOWER Model

The 6 Components of the EMPOWER Model

The Facilitating Change process is the engine of EMPOWER. It operates on the foundation that people can’t be made to change but they can choose to change.

Including Treatment Strategies and Core Skills, shows that there is a definable process that maximises the chances that a client will commit to change. In broad terms this approach is called the client centred or person-centred approach.

There are two Facilitating Change processes: the First Session process and then the Ongoing Session process. The Initial Session consists of the following stages:

1. Establish rapport
2. Role clarification: worker and client roles
   
3. Assist in identifying relative strengths
4. Goal setting
5. Problem solving strategies
6. Summarising current situation
7. Initiating action
8. Review of goals
   

Attaining proficiency in the person-centred approach has two parts. First, mastery of three treatment strategies and, second, mastery of four core skills. 

Mindset issues, such as a fixed mindset (‘I am helpless to assist my clients’ or ‘my clients are incapable of change regardless of what I do’) can make workers more susceptible to compassion fatigue. And this could make them more likely to leave their roles.

The EMPOWER model uses three learning aides to help workers test out the mindsets of support and caseworkers:

1. The 7 ‘Helping Profession’ Worker Types
2. The 3 Dialectical Dilemmas
3. The 8 Myths of the Helping Professions

These learning aides help the worker to identify or make conscious unhelpful beliefs and attitudes and increases their capacity for them to be contested or challenged. Importantly they form a basis for Empowerment Coaching.

Coaching is a critical element to the development of both the tangible skill and mindset components of the EMPOWER model.

With our Empowerment Coaching we provide a direct supervision level of support to your staff. This allows us to guide workers as they learn and apply core skills and combat compassion fatigue mindsets.

We utilise a behavioural approach called Behavioural Event Mentoring (BEM) to coach the skills component of EMPOWER and a traditional reflective practice to address the mindset issues. Our aim is to support your staff to empower clients for excellent life outcomes.

Caseworkers and support workers work with some of the most vulnerable and traumatised people in the country. Because of this, some clients can become aggressive. And some may even attempt to physically assault workers.

We believe that potentially aggressive clients deserve services to help them achieve a fulfilling and meaningful life. But we must ensure the safety of workers first.

The Preventing Occupational Violence component of EMPOWER allows us to achieve this balance between worker safety and helping potentially aggressive clients. It provides workers with specific safety training, such as verbal de-escalation skills.

A strength-based approach assumes that vulnerable people have strengths. A key role of the worker is to help the clients recognise those strengths and see how they can be used to solve the current problems.

EMPOWER includes a formal process for clients to identify their strengths at the engagement stage. These strengths are referred to throughout the case work engagement.

Professional boundaries and professional relationships are different ways to think about how clients can be harmed in the course of providing them with assistance to realise a ‘fulfilling and meaningful life’. When a worker crosses a professional boundary there is a real risk of harm.

In the EMPOWER model we emphasise the strict requirement to refrain from harming any client, but EMPOWER is also about more than preventing harm to a client.

Within the EMPOWER model, we work to understand and form professional relationships as an integral part of the therapeutic relationship and that support that therapeutic nature.

EMPOWER Coaching is critical to the development of therapeutic relationships with clients.

Professional boundaries and professional relationships are different ways to think about how clients can be harmed in the course of providing them with assistance to realise a ‘fulfilling and meaningful life’. When a worker crosses a professional boundary there is a real risk of harm.

In the EMPOWER model we emphasise the strict requirement to refrain from harming any client, but EMPOWER is also about more than preventing harm to a client.

Within the EMPOWER model, we work to understand and form professional relationships as an integral part of the therapeutic relationship and that support that therapeutic nature.

EMPOWER Coaching is critical to the development of therapeutic relationships with clients.

Developing Delivery Competence

Classroom and eLearning training are not enough to make sure that skills learned are transferred into the work place for the benefit of your clients. To truly develop competence, workers must demonstrate the skill in real time (i.e., when working with a client) then receive feedback on their performance from a knowledgeable practitioner.

In the EMPOWER approach, that knowledgeable person is the EMPOWER Coach. There are three ways we can provide direct feedback to workers:

EMPOWER is revolutionary because it requires direct observation of a practice to ensure worker competence.