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ASC Provider Briefing - 19 August 2022
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Dear Care Provider Colleagues,
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Welcome to this week's briefing.
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We hope you have made it through the heatwave safe and well. This week in the briefing: an opportunity to have your say about our future support, information about the South West Care Home Network Awards, a request for volunteers from Public Health and a researcher in Bristol, updates from the Capacity Tracker and the PPE Portal, several new events, and more!
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Please find the latest news and updates from Adult Social Care below:
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Have your say: how can we support you?
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At this week’s provider webinar, we ran an interactive session to get your views to ensure we’re making the best use of your time and covering the topics you care about.
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There’s still time to have your say, and it should only take a few minutes.
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Did you miss the webinar? Catch up on Teams
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South West Care Home Network Awards
Congratulations to Wessex House for winning the Winner of the Managing Deterioration Award from the South West Care Home Network (run by South West Academic Health Science Network).
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Please view this short video that recognises their hard work on Managing Deterioration: WESSEX HOUSE on Vimeo
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Nominations are closing soon for the next round of awards from the South West Care Home Network!
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Please take a few minutes to nominate a care home for their achievements and interventions around Safety Culture and User Co-design during the past 12 months.
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The two categories for the next awards are:
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- The Care Home Safety Culture Award - In recognition of a Care Home individual or team, that have created a Safety Culture through Managing Deterioration or Medicine Safety in the past 12 months
- The Care Home User Co-Design Award - In recognition of a Care Home, individual or team that have made an impact in managing and improving health and wellbeing in the past 12 months.
The deadline for nominations is the 26th of August.
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The winners will be announced at the next South West Care Home Network meeting on the 14th September via Zoom – see the Events section below.
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Catheter Passport
You may or may not be aware, but Somerset has a single system Catheter Passport that should be provided whenever an individual is discharged from one of the Acute Trusts with a catheter. It's important that this is provided to make sure that you as the provider are aware of the rationale behind the catheterisation and other pertinent information such as the contact person should any concerns arise. Here is an example (blank) passport so you know what to expect: Somerset Catheter Passport
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Please do look out for the passport and challenge the discharging ward if you take a resident back from the acute trust whenever the Passport is not made available to you.
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Patient and Public Involvement Group Research
A PhD student in Bristol is looking for care home managers, staff and residents to join a patient and public involvement (PPI) group for research on infection surveillance in care homes. The group will meet 6 or 7 times over 6 months to give feedback on new environmental sampling methods, and how surveillance information is collected and presented back to care homes. Participants will be paid for their time.
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Evaluation of Test Kits Study – looking for care settings to volunteer
Throughout the pandemic UKHSA has undertaken a number of quality assurance exercises (‘evaluations’) to monitor the performance of Covid-19 Tests in detecting new variants as they emerge. These previous activities included evaluations undertaken at NHS Test and Trace Sites following the emergence of the Alpha, Delta and Omicron variants. Now that mass population testing has stopped and NHS Test and Trace sites have closed, it is important that we are still able to assess whether the current Covid-19 tests continue to protect vulnerable populations, such as Adult Social Care resident and staff, by delivering high levels of performance against current variants of Covid-19.
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Care homes routinely report new Covid-19 outbreaks to their Local Health Protection Team/Local Authority. The PHCO Evaluation Team will work with the HTP/LA contacts across England to identify 30-40 Care Homes who have reported an outbreak in the previous 24 hours to participate in the evaluation. Care Homes in outbreak should be selected to participate based on local insights from the HTP/LA contacts on their suitability to meet the following key requirements.
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What does it mean for local Health Protection/Local Authority teams?
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Care Homes routinely report new outbreaks to their HPT/LA contacts. We need these local contacts to work with us to be our ‘finger on the pulse’ of what’s happening in their area. We will work with the regional HPT/LA leads to identify a list of HPT/LA contacts who are best placed to be aware of new outbreaks in their region and who have existing relationships with their local Adult Social Care Homes. The evaluation is expected to start in Mid-August 2022 and take 2-3 weeks to complete. During this period, the PHCO Evaluation team will reach out via telephone to the HPT/LA contacts in each region once or twice to receive an update on new Care Home outbreaks in their area, who may be suitable to participate in the evaluation.
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Care Home selection criteria:
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- A new outbreak reported within the last 24 hours.
- Selected Care Homes should not be already taking part in the Vivaldi study (because they also use pre-labelled barcoded PCRs in that study). Note: The Evaluation Team have a list of these homes we can cross-check.
- Ideally the Care Home should be larger in size (e.g. 50-100 staff and resident)
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PPE Portal Q&A
On Wednesday the PPE Portal held a Q&A for local authorities and local resilience forums. Here is a short summary of the discussions:
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- A quick reminder of the links to the important customer notices, Hunan and Easimask. The latest update was on 27th June but I will certainly update the group if I hear of any more updates.
- We discussed PPE demand/statistics on the call. We publish stats about this on GOV.UK, please see here. If you’re looking for anything more granular, e.g. at your local authority level, please let me know and I will see what I can do!
- I also mentioned our PPE future ordering survey that is live on our Portal website, it seeks to understand people’s ordering behaviour/preferences. Because of the survey platform that we use, people can only fill out the survey if they are logged into their Portal accounts.
- We are continuing to conduct user research on the PPE Portal, as it’s our aim to ensure that the Portal is as accessible and easy to use as possible, for our diverse user base. If you’d be interested in sharing your feedback on the Portal through a user interview, or if you know anyone who might benefit from a 1:1 session about the Portal, please let me know and I’d be very happy to arrange a call.
- Of course, our customer services team (0800 876 6802) continue to be available 8am – 5pm, Monday to Friday, to support users with any queries about the Portal.
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Changes to Capacity Tracker
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This week there were several changes to the capacity tracker. For full details please see this communication.
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Latest Covid-19 Outbreak update
(Friday 18 August 2022)
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We are seeing reduced numbers of positive Covid cases and fewer outbreaks in care settings. We are still experiencing high levels of system pressure.
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In The News This Week
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Events
South West Care Home Network Meeting
September 14th, 10am – 12.30pm
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The agenda for this September includes the CQC and NICE – there is an opportunity for you to find out more about what they are doing and how to support care homes to improve or approach their next inspection.
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We’ll offer an opportunity for the audience to discuss their experiences with CQC and it will finish on the SW Care Home Awards which recognises local care homes for their hard work and achievements across 2 categories at each of our network events.
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It’s FREE for anyone to attend including Care Homes staff, Providers, Support Staff, or CCG, local authorities, and EHCH teams to attend.
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Please forward this information on to anyone that might be interested in nominations or attending the care home network event.
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Places still available:
Workforce Planning Workshops
Do you want to understand more about social care workforce planning? A good workforce plan will help your organisation be more successful and ensure you have the right people with the right skills at the right time to meet the needs and future opportunities for your business and the local population.
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Skills for Care is working in partnership with Somerset County Council to deliver a free to attend learning and development opportunity for care provider employers across Somerset to engage them in workforce planning and workforce re-design.
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This will consist of two face-to-face half days sessions that will describe what workforce planning is, national and local drivers, how to affect change and workforce transformation, as well as provide a number of practical resources.
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This will be followed by a virtual follow-up session to share ideas, learning, any challenges and hear from others.
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After attending the course, delegates will be able to:
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- Define what is workforce planning
- Explain why it is important
- Demonstrate how find relevant data and summarise using templates
- Interpret data, local and national drivers to establish priorities to create a workforce plan
The workshops are targeted primarily at those with a responsibility for workforce transformation and re-design from any size of organisation, for example senior managers/owners, nominated individuals, registered managers, HR leads.
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These workshops will take place in two cohorts. You can select your preferred cohort when you register.
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Wednesday 14 September 2022 and Tuesday 20 September 2022
10:00 – 13:00 (09:30 registration)
The Albemarle Centre, Taunton
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Wednesday 28 September 2022 and Tuesday 04 October 2022
10:00 – 13:00 (09:30 registration)
The Albemarle Centre, Taunton
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Both cohorts – virtual session
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Thursday 17 November 2022
10:00 – 12:00
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World Suicide Prevention Day
Walk for a Life
September 10th, 2022 is World Suicide Prevention Day, and this year Somerset County Council is running a Walk for a Life event.
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Join us this World Suicide Prevention Day for our Walk for a Life event - to remember those we have lost, raise awareness and encourage and empower people in Somerset to take action to prevent suicide.
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Walk start time - 10am
Location: Stragglers Coffee House, St. James Street, Taunton TA1 1JT, following a wheelchair/pushchair friendly loop around Taunton, ending back at the Cricket Ground.
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Afterwards at Stragglers Coffee House there will be various activities, in association with Open Mental Health, Mind in Somerset, Somerset Suicide Bereavement Support Service, Somerset Activity and Sport Partnership, The Reader, Stepladder, Healthwatch Somerset, Somerset Recovery College, Somerset County Council Public Health, Young Somerset, Somerset Foundation Trust, 2BU, and Somerset Drug and Alcohol Service.
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Free parking is available at the venue and there will be accessible toilets. There will also be various activities and talks during the day and refreshments will be available to purchase.
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We will also be launching the new Orange Button Community Scheme on this day, come along to find out how you can reduce the stigma around suicide and help us in our drive to prevent all suicides in Somerset.
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Upcoming Event Reminders
- Application of the Mental Capacity Act for 16 and 17 Year Olds, Tuesday 11th October 2022, 9am to 1.30pm. See the flyer, and book your place here.
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Please continue to share or promote these briefings and our webpage to others in your organisations.
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Our incident room mailbox and contact details (see below) remains operational during core working hours so please get in touch if you have any urgent concerns or queries we can look to assist you with.
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Somerset’s Provider Engagement Team
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Adult Social Care (ASC) COVID19 Response Team
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