Learn to identify and respond to the additional needs you may encounter when working in occupied housing, from communication barriers and cultural considerations to medical equipment dependencies and lone-working safety protocols.
Every property you visit is also someone's home. Working effectively in occupied housing means looking beyond the task to understand the person living there. This course introduces the concept of additional needs and the three categories you are most likely to encounter — communication and culture, personal wellbeing and respect, and safety and environment — then walks through the end-to-end resident support process and where your role fits within it. Written for tradespeople, engineers, surveyors and scheduling staff in housing and construction.
Additional needs, resident profiling, resident liaison officer (RLO), pre-booking screening, pre-visit briefing, aborted visit, communication barriers, dementia, low vision, hearing impairment, mobility, medical equipment dependency, cultural and religious considerations, lone-working protocol, hoarding, resident management system
You will learn what 'additional needs' means in a housing context: any circumstance requiring you or your team to do something differently. Across three categories, you will explore common needs and the practical adjustments each calls for — plain language and visual aids for communication barriers, calm reintroduction for dementia, planned access routes for mobility, confirming powered medical equipment before starting, etiquette awareness for cultural and religious boundaries, lone-working protocols where aggression has been recorded, and observing but never disturbing a hoard. You will understand that most adjustments are small, and that your role is to recognise, adapt and report — not to diagnose or resolve.
You will follow the resident profiling chain from end to end: gathering known information from the housing association, pre-booking screening by scheduling staff, resident assessment by the RLO, the pre-visit briefing, the visit itself, and post-visit reporting. You will identify which stages you own — typically the final three — and understand that a missed screening question or unread note creates a gap the next person cannot easily fill. A scenario tests what to do when a resident discloses a new oxygen dependency that is not yet on the records.
