Being a multi-cultural person-centred service is our speciality because FirstCare is the epitome of the person-centred approach to service delivery. FirstCare does not only provide a person-centred service but it incorporates the person-centred approach in all the services we provide, and this has made our services unique.
Humility is at the heart of FirstCare person-centred services. We employ academically competent employees. Our employees, however, understand that their academic qualifications do not make them experts in our service users’ lives and needs. For this reason, FirstCare employs people who are humble enough to put their academic qualifications aside and let them be guided by our service users in regards to what is best for them and in satisfying their needs.
FirstCare puts the service users first, and that allows FirstCare to be attuned to our service users. All our employees are trained in understanding the underlying conditions of the person-centred approach when providing services to our service users. These are Congruence, Unconditional Positive Regard, Empathy and Personal Power. FirstCare employees are trained to comply with the professional values of the person-centred approach which are Individualisation, Self-determination, Respect and Confidentiality. These are aimed at understanding and respecting that our service users are unique, capable of making their own decisions and are experts in their lives.
FirstCare employees are equipped with basic communication skills in the Person-Centred approach, specifically Attentiveness, Listening and Empathy. Our employees are trained to apply the person-centred approach propositions. These are aimed at understanding our service users and what possibly motivates them, at various levels of consciousness. Furthermore, the propositions provide tentative guidelines for all employees in their efforts to understand, think about and make sense of what they observe of our service users and their significant others – what they say, do and feel when we encounter them.
Australia is a multi-cultural country, and it is for this reason all our employees are fully trained in the therapeutic skills of the person-centred approach. At FirstCare, our service users are trusted, accepted, and believe in their power for them to grow and develop and participate fully as members of society. All FirstCare employees create a safe and conducive environment for our service users to be able to trust and believe in their potential to grow.
At FirstCare, we view and understand our service users as a complete whole by not singling out features which are a portion of the holistic organism. At FirstCare, we adhere to the person-centred approach and perspective which views each service user as a complete whole with their ideas, feelings, behaviour, needs, values, and physical attributes.
At FirstCare, we support our service users through understanding the self as perceived by each service user and that the self is continually changing. We understand that our services users ‘self’ is influenced by their conscious and unconscious life experiences, their interaction with the environment and their significant others, values that fit with their self-structure and values that are adopted from the significant others. All employees are trained to perceive the behaviours of our service users as a communication method to inform us about the needs that they want to satisfy, and if those needs are being satisfactorily met or not. At FirstCare, we utilise a skill called ‘attentiveness’ whereby we treat our service users with an understanding of their uniqueness and individual perceptions, experiences, needs, behaviour, values, emotions and self. This skill drives our multi-cultural person-centred service, and our humility, as our service users receive a service that encompasses their lives as a whole.