Care Homes
Enabling the South West care home sector to work and improve together, learning and sharing across our region
Overview
Uniting care homes through our South West Care Home Network.
Appreciating care homes through our South West Care Home Awards.
Detailed Programme Information
Enabling the South West care home sector to improve, learn and share together.
The South West AHSN is working to enable the care home sector to work together through its South West Care Home Network and quality improvement methods.
South West Care Home Network
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, many care homes were working in silo. The South West AHSN established the South West Care Home Network to unite care homes on a virtual platform.
The Network meets quarterly to provide care home staff with opportunities to improve their care and services through learning and sharing good practice as well as exploring solutions to common issues.
We welcomed 186 attendees across our three South West Care Home Network events in 2022/23.
South West Care Home Awards
The South West Care Home Awards are hosted by the South West Care Home Network to celebrate good practice, improvement and innovation in care homes across the region, in categories including ‘safety culture’, ‘exceptional leadership’ and ‘COVID heroes’.
The awards have provided recognition, appreciation for the sector, and highlighted some of the extraordinary work that care homes are carrying out to support their residents, families and the NHS.
Visit our Vimeo channel to watch videos about our care home winners.
Reducing adverse medicine administration events in care homes
Medication administration errors can cause avoidable and unnecessary harm to residents, and impact their families, as well as create additional challenges for staff to overcome.
As part of the NHS England and Improvement Medicines Safety Improvement Programme in 2021-22, the South West Patient Safety Collaborative worked with care homes across Devon, Cornwall and Somerset to improve the safety of medicine administration by carrying out tests or change in a range of areas, including:
- Managing interruptions
- Three-way communication
- Safety huddles
- Learning from events
In Langley House care home in Somerset, an innovative pilot resulted in a reduction in the number of interruptions on medicines rounds. Read the case study here.
Improvements from the pilots were fed into a national programme, determining their impact and success.
“As I became involved with the pilot I became very aware that [managing interruptions] could have a major impact upon our service. I was able to engage my staff team enthusiastically as it didn’t add pressure to their roles, and they could see the positive development within the service.”
Trevor Jackson
Deputy Manager, Langley House, Somerset
Managing Deterioration
Recognising deterioration in a timely manner can help prevent or minimize the need for escalation to hospital settings among care home residents. Spotting deterioration has been particularly pertinent during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The South West Patient Safety Collaborative is supporting the training of care home staff in the use of valuable managing deterioration tools RESTORE2 and RESTORE2mini. Learn more about RESTORE2 and RESTORE2mini.
In 2022/23, 1,200 staff in over 245 care homes across the South West were trained in RESTORE2.
Get in touch
For more information about our work with care homes, please contact our Programme Lead, Nikki Taylor.
