Joint Care Homes Quality Team

NHS Derbyshire County, Derbyshire County Council Adult Care, Derbyshire LINks

Health and social care agencies across Derbyshire have come together through the Joint Care Home Quality Improvement Programme to improve the quality of residential and nursing care home provision in the county.

Through a combination of monitoring, targeted support, training and commissioning coordination there is now measurably better quality of provision and better information available for staff that make individual commissioning decisions.

Homes that had been awarded 0-1stars by the Care Quality Commission were priorities for intervention and we developed an intensive visiting programme.

A workshop early in the project brought together representatives from care homes. It was so well received that we set up a network of care home clinicians and managers. An 18-month pilot project of learning sets for home managers was described as ‘life-changing’ by the participants who shared good practice and took their learning back to the homes.

Derbyshire LINk visited all homes in the county and jointly audited Derbyshire County Council owned homes – these homes have now achieved the prestigious ISO 9001 quality management award.

Clinical quality standards, launched in 2009, led to the first clinical quality audit examining clinical practices at all 85 homes. The results allowed providers, for the first time, to benchmark themselves against others in their area. The programme will also include quality of life measures and will be led by the patient and public involvement team, patients, relatives, carers, LINks and voluntary groups.

One year on, with no additional resource, the project has had significant impact:

·         85% of homes are now rated as good or excellent (compared with 61% 12 months ago)

·         13% of homes now have a 0-1 star rating (compared with 34% previously)

·          78% of publically supported residents now live in 2 or 3 star accommodations.