What is the positive change that has emerged through new collaborations or partnerships during Covid-19 that your project is going to embed?

During the recent COVID pandemic, the Northern Trust developed new and innovative connections with local GPs and Care Homes to limit the impact and spread of COVID 19 whilst supporting the isolated residents. Within a very short timescale, senior practitioners established the requirement for a full clinical support team into care homes which had experienced a COVID outbreak.  Each day the Senior Community Nurse and Trust Manager would go into the care home and facilitate a virtual ward round with each resident. The resident was able to see, hear and contribute to the conversation about their health and social care needs via Zoom on an iPad positioned directly in front of them. This enabled the online clinicians to receive full clinical observations and interact with the resident before agreeing a treatment plan. The feedback from residents, care home staff and families has been incredible to date.

What does your project aim to achieve?

This project aims to provide a timely, safe interactive multidisciplinary platform for residents to contribute to the review of their own health and social care needs and reducing hospital admissions by identifying patients who are high risk and effectively managing them by June 2021. The objectives of the project include;

– Prototype the virtual ward round

– Wrap MDT around the patients needs virtually

– Create capacity within the MDT with the use of Technology

– Enhance the quality of care for residents

– Reduce unnecessary admissions to hospital for residents.

The project also will offer the Care Home with a new platform to raise any clinical concerns about a resident and received speedy solutions. Through Multidisciplinary working it is the aim of the project to reduce the impact of frailty, illness and hospitalisation through earlier detection and intervention.

How will the project be delivered?

The small project team will be led by a Senior Nurse and supported by suitably skilled members of the multidisciplinary care team to include care home representatives. The team will meet and agree roles and responsibilities, including parameters of the project. The structure established during COVID will act as a framework. Weekly MDT reports will be produced to support the ongoing evaluation of the project.

The Northern Health and Social Care Trust are clear on the need to improve the frequency of support to care homes experiencing an outbreak. The project aims to evaluate the frequency of 999 calls and admissions into ED against the 2019/20 data. The project group will gather both qualitative and quantitative data from the weekly MDT interventions.

Measuring impact will be via engaging stakeholders, develop a robust evaluation framework and mixed methods of collection.

How is your project going to share learning?

Across the UK many local Trusts and Councils are struggling to develop a single transferable strategy for supporting care home residents during the outbreak. This project offers a transferable model which can be easily used across the country. It’s simplistic in style and offers residents, families and health and social care professionals a safe platform to interact with residents.

The project aims to develop several forms of learning mediums for stakeholders across the UK. These will include regular reports and videos on progress, QI poster presentations at local HSC events and online platforms such as HSC Knowledge Exchange, Care opinion, Care Homes QI, Q Exchange and HSCQI. We aim to also capture service user experiences in various formats.