Thistle Learning

Inspiring and developing best practice among practitioners and organisations.

At Thistle we focus on the person, not their disability, health condition or situation. We listen deeply to people and tailor our support around what they hope to achieve, working beside them until they are able to manage life without us. This is the Thistle Approach.

We believe that, irrespective of professional discipline, there exists a core set of values, principles and good conversational practice skills that enable practitioners to focus on what matters most to people and what they want to achieve from support.

These skills, based on solution-focused and person-centred principles and practice, enable practitioners to:

improve the experience people have;
support shared decision making; and
negotiate and agree support plans which focus on people’s outcomes, enhancing wellbeing and living a meaningful life.

At a service level this approach promotes recovery, prevention, rehabilitation, anticipatory care and support for self-management. At an organisational level, we support managers and leaders to model these approaches in the service of transformational change.

What we do

We know that good training and learning is rooted in practice. Our Learning team works with individuals, teams and organisations within the health, social care, voluntary and independent sectors in Scotland. They create bespoke training programmes that encourage and develop best practice in health and social care that mirrors the Thistle Approach.

Thistle has delivered work in partnership with the Scottish Government, JIT, NESS, the Alliance (Scotland), NHS boards across Scotland and more.

Who we work with

Our courses

Good conversations training

House of Care Service

Leadership & Organisational Development

Person-centred Planning & Big Plans

Personal Outcomes & Human Worries

Meet our trainers

Julie Gardner

Julie has 20 years of experience in the voluntary sector with a focus on engaging with people to improve support offered. She has worked with VOCAL for 14 years to plan and develop support for unpaid carers and has been working to embed a focus on personal outcomes.
Linsay Graham

Linsay Graham is a Training Consultant with a professional background in mental health nursing. She specialises in solution-focused practice and has extensive experience in supporting professional development of practitioners.
Ross Grieve

Ross leads the external Training and Consultancy work for Thistle. His professional background is in physio therapy and he brings a wealth of rehabilitation and self management experience to Thistle’s Health & Wellbeing and training consultancy services.
Steve Coulson

Steve leads learning and development for staff at Thistle and contributes to external training. He has 20 years of experience in social work and is a person-centred planning facilitator. He has worked at various organizations and has co-authored a book on person-centred planning.
Heather Simmons

Heather has 30 years’ experience in social care - from bus escort to Director of Learning and Culture at C-Change. Heather joined Thistle as Academy Lead in 2021 and was already familiar to many of the people we support and their families through her work with Thistle’s Family Forum.