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Creating a system view of quality of life for care home residents

This project will create a robust process to share and monitor lived experience, bringing the voice of residents into a whole system view of safety in care homes.

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  • Idea
  • 2019

Meet the team

Also:

  • Francine Thorpe
  • Keith Darragh
  • Paul Walsh
  • Jeff Niel

What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to your chosen theme?

“Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted”.

In Salford, health and care partners have a shared aim to create the safest health and care system in the UK. Care homes (residential and nursing) are traditionally an under-represented and misunderstood part of this system. This project is part of a wider programme to improve safety in Salford care homes by bringing together all parts of the system which interact with care home residents to provide better quality of care (e.g. district nursing, mental health, occupational therapy, safeguarding, pharmacy).

However there is a “measurement gap” in terms of how we measure and monitor safety in care homes, this is care delivered in someone’s home and not a clinical environment. We are over-reliant on CQC inspection scores and ad-hoc feedback, without a robust system to learn about safety as suggested by Professor Charles Vincent in the Measuring and Monitoring of Safety Framework.

What does your project aim to achieve?

This project will help us create a balanced score card of safety, bringing together views from the whole community of professionals supporting care home residents with hard data and softer intelligence.

The lived experience of a care home resident is fundamental to achieving good quality care, yet we have no standardised approach to understand whether we are meeting the needs of our residents and families effectively.

By better understanding the impact the design of care pathways on the lived experience for our most vulnerable people, we can re-design systems and processes with the voice of the resident at the centre, creating a safer health economy.

This project will:

  • test what information is useful to collect
  • test how this information is collected, co-designing processes with care homes
  • create a robust and standardised process
  • test how this information can be presented and shared to support strategic decision making and support improvement activity

How you can contribute

  • sharing other examples of how the lived experience has informed quality improvement
  • bringing measurement for improvement expertise to the use of data
  • using knowledge of the latest thinking of safety

Comments

  1. Hi Jo, have you already come across work from UnLtd & the Design Council in the South West on Transform Ageing? Some really interesting stuff there about using lived experience on their innovation briefs: https://www.unltd.org.uk/our-support/our/transform-ageing

    1. This is a fabulous resource. Thanks for sharing Anna.

    2. Hi Anna - I haven't seen this before but it's a great example of really involving people in later life at all stages of the design process. I really like this approach and might have to borrow a few ideas from it - I will be sharing it with our local CCG innovation team as it's a great example.

  2. Thanks Jo and Kate - would love to hear if there is anything you are aware of that has started to develop this, as we have a few thoughts and ideas but any learning from elsewhere to direct us would be HUGELY helpful!

  3. Patient Safety Collaboratives will be interested in this as we are supporting 2 national programmes working in care homes: the recognition & response to deteriorating patients and medicines safety. look forward to hearing how this develops.

  4. This is a great idea and we will be very interested to see how it develops. We have been looking at how we can make the voices of those living in social care settings louder. I'll make sure our lead is aware of your idea as I think it will help us with what we hope to do .

     

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