Care Homes Collaborative Celebrations

On Wednesday 21 January, we welcomed our Care Homes collaborative for the final summit celebration event at Haelo HQ, Salford Quays.

The work of the Safer Care Homes collaborative contributes to Safer Salford’s wider ambition to collaboratively produce and test a roadmap to enable Salford to become safest health and social care system in the UK by 2022. Watch our short film to find out why.

Of the 242,000 people currently living in Salford, 14% are over 65 years old, with approximately 1,400 people living in elderly care homes.

Having identified an opportunity to work together in 2016, a number of Salford care homes embarked on a year long programme to facilitate improvement in safety for residents and staff. Using the Breakthrough Series Collaborative model to support improvement, care homes shared learning, built their understanding of safety culture and developed improvement capability of staff, focusing specifically on:

  • Reducing falls
  • Medication safety
  • Pressure ulcer prevention

An expert panel, with representatives from Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust (SRFT), Salford City Council (SCC), Salford Care Homes Forum, Salford Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) have led the ambitious Safer Salford programme and therefore supporting this stream of work.

Launched in November 2016, nine care homes in Salford joined the year-long Safer Care Homes improvement programme. The collaborative required attendance at three learning lessons and using action periods in-between these sessions teams to collect data, test changes in their care homes and host exchange visits.

Today brings us the final summit event and with opening words from Tazeem Shah, Safer Care Home Programme Manager, we officially begin the celebrations.

Paul Walsh, Salford CCG Integrated Commissioning Manager (Older People) reflects on the journey so far and our mission to enhance the quality of care homes within Salford through improving safety via collaborative learning. Teams have come a long way with learning, confidence and sharing together throughout this programme of work, creating lasting relationships and an appreciation of the efforts and challenges of running an improvement project.

Together we look back to January and the first learning session. Work had started before this day but this was the first time the collaborative met for the first time. Before the event, Caroline Rogers, Senior Programme Manager wrote the story so far in a blog post for the website.

At the first event, the collaborative had an introduction to improvement science methodology, our shared aim and theory for change. Teams learned about driver diagrams, developing ideas and tests of change. Alex Buckley, Haelo’s Data Analyst presented on the importance of data and having a measurement strategy.

You may recall the enthusiasm in learning session two where improvement discussions started to take off and where we heard our first team presentations from Thornton Lodge, Newlands and Wentworth House Care Homes. Also in the session, teams learnt about the model for Improvement and how to document improvement with PDSA’s.

In the third and final learning session, Cherry Trees, Fountains and Heartly Green Care Homes presented. Teams started to develop the change package and began action planning.

Paul asks the room to reflect, celebrate and be determined to sustain and scale this work by sharing with your colleagues who aren’t here today and beyond. “We want to create a sustainable improvement cycle that will continue.”

Back at the front, Tazeem reviews the Safer Care Homes timeline, recalling the Haelo site visits from the team: Caroline Rogers, Bob Diepeveen, Alex Buckley and Tazeem Shah. The collaborative also benefitted from peer exchange visits, where care homes hosted fellow members to share best practice.

Throughout the timeline we pin pointed where we worked on tests of change, various events and the bespoke falls training session. Our journey finally brings us to the summit today, where our next steps are to prepare change package materials before the programme comes to a close in April 2018. Tazeem reminds us of the theories that have underpinned this work including the Model for Improvement, “Start small, fail fast and learn quick”.

Next up, you can’t have an improvement project without any data! Bob presents Data, Data, Data – reviewing what we set out achieve, to reduce pressure ulcers, fall and medication administration errors, and the next steps ahead of us.

The majority of care home projects looked at falls, with one home focusing on medication errors. Despite not yet seeing significant changes in our data, valuable learning has been documented, resources shared and when looking at individual cases we can see how teams have made a difference to patient’s lives.

It’s inspiring to see the growing number of compliments for the services and staff as evidence of the care team are providing. And finally, teams saw the QI capability questionnaire that has been filled out by all teams at the start of the collaborative and after each learning session, to review how far they have come.

In the first of our care home presentations today, Lynn Kaye, Care Homes Manager at Barton Brook shares their project and how they focused on one residential unit, Marton House, for the collaborative. Lynn explained the importance and value of her team feeling and being a part of something bigger to improve safety in Salford.

In brief, the team found that the person administrating medication was answering the phone during medication rounds. By introducing a mobile phone and an alternative staff member taking messages, all medication errors were reduced to zero! As regard to falls, they were discussed regularly in team meetings, they kept a falls diary and introduced ‘pimp my zimmer’.

Care Home Improvements. Staff and patients with ‘pimped’ zimmer frames and walking sticks.

Ecclesholme Care Home are next up to present. Karina Baldwin, Dementia Lead described their journey through the process using patient case studies.

It’s now over to Bob Diepeveen, Senior Improvement Advisor and Ste Miller, Multimedia Content Producer at Haelo. Care Homes have been showing off their great work at peer exchanges and learning sessions, but now it’s time to show the world (let’s be ambitious)!

In an interactive digital session, a task is posed to the room to make a 60 second film about your improvement project. Equipped with top tips, teams break for lunch to plan and film their masterpieces before presenting back to the room. Take a look…

After the film premieres, Tammy Pearson, Deputy Manager at Broughton House Care Home, a charity based home for all ex service men and women, presents our final Care Home presentation to the room. Tammy explored their project’s focus on topical medication, sharing their learning regarding consistent internal communications.

As the event comes to a close, it’s time to award our fabulous teams. All teams receive a certificate of achievement for completing the collaborative. In addition, three special recognition certificates were awarded to:

Most Innovative Heartly Green Care Home
Inspiring Improvers The Fountains Care Home
Best Adopters of Improvement Science Ecclesholme Care Home

Presenting the certificates today is (L) Dr Louise Butler, Consultant Geriatrician, SRFT and (R) Francine Thorpe, Director of Quality & Innovation at Salford CCG.

In closing remarks, Francine explains Salford CCG’s connection as the sponsor of the whole Safer Salford programme. “We’re at the start of a long journey and it’s been great to see Salford’s Care Homes involvement in this journey. You are a really important part of our system, looking after some of the most vulnerable residents in our city. It’s so important that your valued work continues.”

The programme has shown a real appetite for improvement in this sector, which will inform our plans for the next steps. Francine continues: “We’re keen to continue this improvement work and the focus on safety. As independent services, teams are able to learn skills on a particular topic and utilise them in the other work that you do to drive improvement. Please take the skills back to your respective organisations and colleagues.”

We hope to have news soon regarding an engagement event where we’ll want your feedback on how we can build on the Safer Care Home results and continue to work together.

Thank you to all teams and care home staff for your involvement. We have been delighted with the level of enthusiasm and interest from care home managers, staff and stakeholders throughout the collaborative. Special thanks to the programme sponsor Salford CCG and the team of expert facilitators at Haelo.

 

 

Resources

For all Safer Care Homes Resources including Safer Care Homes newsletters, improvement tools, articles, annual reports, photo galleries, films, red to react and papers follow this link.

Watch Making Health and Social Care Safer in Salford to find out why Salford partners; Salford Clinical Commissioning Group, Salford City Council, Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, Greater Manchester West Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust and Haelo, have embarked on an ambitious improvement programme to make Salford the safest health and social care system in the UK.

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