In this blog, Angharad Dalton, our Head of Innovation Capability and Coaching, discusses how our innovation coaching service supported Pembrokeshire County Council adult services to build confidence and capability in case recording.
Through our innovation coaching service, we’re often asked to support complex practice challenges where confidence, clarity and consistency matter just as much as compliance.
That was exactly the case when we partnered with Pembrokeshire County Council adult services to explore how teams can feel more confident and capable in their case recording.
The coaching ‘ask’
Managers and supervisors across Pembrokeshire identified a familiar but critical challenge: case recording was essential but not always easy.
While everyone understood its importance for safeguarding, continuity of care and defensible decision-making, there were recurring uncertainties in practice:
- How much detail is enough or too much?
- How do you balance facts, professional judgement and the person’s voice?
- What makes a record truly useful to colleagues, managers, or inspectors?
- How can recording feel less like a compliance task and more like good practice?
What Pembrokeshire wanted from our coaching service was help to build staff confidence, shared understanding and practical capability in case recording.
What we delivered
We designed and facilitated a collaborative, psychologically safe workshop for managers, team managers and supervisors, focused on learning through discussion, reflection and doing.
The session was built to help move staff through thinking about purpose, shared understanding, applied practice and real-world action.
1. Grounding in purpose -
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We started the session by reframing case recording as more than documentation. Together, the group identified case recording as:
- a foundation for continuity of care
- a tool for professional communication across systems
- a key part of safeguarding and defensible decision-making.
This framing helped move the conversation in the session away from compliance and towards why recording matters in practice.
2. Co-designing ‘what good looks like’ -
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Next, attendees worked together to define the ‘Pembrokeshire way’ for good case recording. In small groups, participants explored:
- what makes a case note clear and useful
- what makes it defensible
- how it can remain respectful and strengths-based.
This created a shared, locally owned definition, increasing both clarity and buy-in across teams.
3. Multi-perspective practice -
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A key feature of the session was analysing anonymised case notes from four different perspectives. These included:
- the practitioner writing it
- a colleague picking up the case
- a manager or inspector
- the individual or family the note is about.
This exercise helped participants see how one piece of writing is experienced very differently depending on the reader, a powerful insight that helped shift thinking.
4. Practising improvement -
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Participants then moved from analysis into action by rewriting case notes.
The purpose of this was to improve the clarity and structure of the notes, separate fact from professional judgement, strengthen the individual’s voice, and ensure the use of neutral, respectful language throughout.
This hands-on activity built practical confidence, in a safe and controlled environment.
5. Embedding confidence in practice -
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The session closed by focusing on sustainability; identifying the things that help build confidence in day-to-day recording, the things that get in the way, and the team norms and system conditions that could support better practice.
This ensured the learning didn’t stay in the room.
What’s changed as a result
While the session itself was just a few hours, it created meaningful shifts in how participants think about and approach case recording:
A shared language and standard
Teams now have a clearer, collectively owned understanding of what ‘good’ looks like, reducing ambiguity and inconsistency.
Increased confidence
By practising together in a safe environment, participants moved from uncertainty to action, feeling more confident in their professional judgement and writing.
Greater awareness of audience and impact
The multi-perspective exercise helped embed the idea that case notes are not just written for yourself, but for a range of audiences, each with different needs.
Practical tools and approaches
Participants left with:
- a clearer mental checklist for strong case notes
- techniques for improving clarity and defensibility
- ideas for peer support and reflective practice in teams.
Momentum for system-level change
Importantly, the session also surfaced the system conditions that influence good recording and identified ways to improve systemic challenges around case recording, creating a foundation for wider improvements beyond individual practice.
Final reflection
Confidence grows through doing, especially when people are given space to reflect, practise and learn together.
By creating a structured but open environment, Pembrokeshire adult social care teams were able to move beyond uncertainty and begin shaping a more confident, consistent and person-centred approach to case recording.
Find out more about our innovation coaching service
If you’d like to know more about how our innovation coaching service could help you, please contact angharad.dalton@socialcare.wales.
Or come and chat to Angharad at one of our regular innovation drop-in sessions.
