Resilient care sector adapts for the future

SPONSORED BY Avery

The need for gov­ern­ment to dri­ve greater align­ment between social care and health­care is an age-old con­ver­sa­tion, but one that has been illu­mi­nat­ed dur­ing the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic. Lack of a joined-up approach to the deliv­ery of care in the UK has long pre­vailed, despite some efforts to bring it clos­er togeth­er.

The social care sec­tor has played an incred­i­bly impor­tant role dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, tak­ing in huge num­bers of res­i­dents to pre­vent the NHS from being over­run, and with­out all of the same test­ing and sup­port. But the gov­ern­ment has a way to go in unit­ing the sec­tors.

Social care work­ers are as skilled and some­times more so than NHS staff, yet often feel they are viewed as an after­thought. This was per­fect­ly encap­su­lat­ed in the ear­ly stages of lock­down when it took weeks for the gov­ern­ment to broad­en the Thurs­day nation­al doorstep applause from only NHS work­ers to every­body on the front­line of the virus.

“If the pan­dem­ic isn’t enough of a sig­nal for deci­sion-mak­ers, leg­is­la­tors and lead­ers of this coun­try to align the way health­care and social care work togeth­er, then I don’t know what is.” says Lisa Sop­er, oper­a­tions direc­tor at Avery Health­care, which runs 56 res­i­den­tial, demen­tia and nurs­ing care homes coun­try­wide. “It should be a defin­ing moment and a les­son to every­one that silo-think­ing and fund­ing doesn’t work.”

Avery is a lead­ing play­er in the social care sec­tor, demon­strat­ing that a well-run care oper­a­tion with the right lev­el of robust and scal­able pro­ce­dures and well-trained staff can quick­ly adapt and with­stand the impact of some­thing as seri­ous as COVID-19, with its many unknowns and lack of a user man­u­al.

Cru­cial­ly, Avery’s com­pre­hen­sive train­ing forms the foun­da­tion of its ser­vice; all employ­ees, no mat­ter what their role, are cross-trained. For exam­ple, house­keep­ers can sup­port with per­son­al care and the well­be­ing team can sup­port res­i­dents at meal times.

Its holis­tic, for­ward-think­ing approach to the pro­vi­sion of care meant Avery was on a stronger foot­ing than most when COVID-19 impact­ed, imme­di­ate­ly estab­lish­ing good access to per­son­al pro­tec­tive equip­ment and adapt­ing its pro­to­cols to pro­tect staff and res­i­dents. Its region­al man­agers didn’t vis­it unless essen­tial, so a robust com­mu­ni­ca­tions strat­e­gy, devel­oped by an inter­nal COVID strat­e­gy team, run via Microsoft Teams meet­ings, meant man­age­ment could con­tin­ue to review and main­tain qual­i­ty across the group.

With 70 per cent of all res­i­dents in care homes liv­ing with some form of demen­tia, it’s imper­a­tive that the sec­tor at large under­stands the best way to care for those affect­ed. In recent years, Avery Health­care has trans­formed its demen­tia approach, with a con­tem­po­rary strat­e­gy focused on enabling peo­ple to con­tin­ue liv­ing a ful­filled life, rather than sim­ply receiv­ing care. Avery’s care homes utilise Skype and social media to enable con­tact between res­i­dents and loved ones, which became invalu­able when fam­i­lies couldn’t vis­it.

“The idea of peo­ple com­ing to live in a care home and sit­ting qui­et­ly while care work­ers do every­thing for them is now very out­dat­ed.” says Jo Cross­land, head of demen­tia care at Avery Health­care.

“Quite right­ly, peo­ple want to con­tin­ue liv­ing their life. We have bespoke train­ing for all of our staff, but par­tic­u­lar­ly around demen­tia care, includ­ing link­ing with high­er edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tions to deliv­er the best and most up-to-date evi­dence-based care pos­si­ble. All our staff are skilled care work­ers and when COVID arrived it meant all of them could sup­port our res­i­dents.

If the pan­dem­ic isn’t enough of a sig­nal for deci­sion-mak­ers, leg­is­la­tors and lead­ers of this coun­try to align the way health­care and social care work togeth­er, then I don’t know what is

“The train­ing we’ve estab­lished at Avery has also giv­en our staff the con­fi­dence to ques­tion some of the local guid­ance dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. At the start of the cri­sis, sev­er­al local com­mu­ni­ty men­tal health teams, includ­ing psy­chi­a­trists, sug­gest­ed that our care homes may have to con­sid­er restrict­ing res­i­dents to their bed­rooms, or increas­ing behav­iour-mod­i­fy­ing or mood-alter­ing med­ica­tion, to sedate res­i­dents suf­fi­cient­ly, so social dis­tanc­ing could be main­tained.

“Respon­si­bly, our staff had the con­fi­dence and knowl­edge from their train­ing to know there were alter­na­tive and more per­son-cen­tred ways of sup­port­ing our res­i­dents to remain safe while con­tin­u­ing to enjoy their lives.”

Avery’s efforts to ensure its res­i­dents can con­tin­ue to enjoy life as nor­mal to them as pos­si­ble extend to activ­i­ties, meals and faith. Avery has become expert not only in deliv­er­ing veg­e­tar­i­an and veg­an diets, but also diver­si­fy­ing for homes in eth­ni­cal­ly diverse areas, with Halal or West Indi­an cui­sine, for exam­ple. In addi­tion, its care homes sup­port a range of reli­gious obser­va­tions, with min­is­ters from var­i­ous faiths com­ing in.

To fur­ther increase its under­stand­ing of res­i­dents, par­tic­u­lar­ly those liv­ing with demen­tia, Avery uses life-sto­ry work to tru­ly under­stand the indi­vid­ual. Work­ing with the res­i­dent and their fam­i­ly, staff devel­op an indi­vid­ual life-sto­ry board, which explores the resident’s life, includ­ing their fam­i­ly, career, hol­i­days, inter­ests and life expe­ri­ences.

Life-sto­ry boards are kept in resident’s bed­rooms, so staff are always remind­ed of the life they have lived so far, enabling them to com­mu­ni­cate in mean­ing­ful and famil­iar ways that are ben­e­fi­cial to the res­i­dent. This is espe­cial­ly sup­port­ive for those with reduc­ing cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties, who are strug­gling to make sense of the world around them; it helps Avery’s car­ers reunite them with those mem­o­ries still pre­served.

This proved par­tic­u­lar­ly valu­able when enter­tain­ers couldn’t enter the care homes, res­i­dents couldn’t go out on trips and oth­er aspects of life were restrict­ed. The infor­ma­tion Avery gath­ered through such life-sto­ry work, as well as its more oper­a­tional pro­to­cols, meant it could main­tain a high qual­i­ty of life with as lit­tle dis­rup­tion as pos­si­ble to its res­i­dents.

“How the pan­dem­ic has informed us about the future of care is that you have to deliv­er it real­ly well, based on a thor­ough under­stand­ing of each indi­vid­ual,” says Avery’s Sop­er.

“Care is not just about med­ica­tion and falls pre­ven­tion. It’s the next phase of a person’s life. If you have a strong com­mu­ni­ty with­in, you can do so much more to ensure res­i­dents have the best qual­i­ty of lifestyle.

“Peo­ple will often have a sense of reluc­tance about mov­ing their loved one into a care home. With the media often dis­tort­ing the real­i­ty, we can assure every­one that care homes are in fact some of the safest places to be at the moment. We’ve always been well pre­pared, resilient, unit­ed and pas­sion­ate about pro­vid­ing excel­lent care to our res­i­dents, which has meant we have with­stood the recent chal­lenges and are well set for the way ahead.”

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it averyhealthcare.co.uk