Home Care Day is taking place this year on Wednesday 4 December 2019!

This is a largely online event which looks to celebrate and recognise of the care at home and housing support services across Scotland – including individuals who access these services,  those who work in the sector, and the opportunities that home care services bring to a wide range of people.

Whether you are a provider, worker or partner, we would love to hear your positive good-news stories about the care at home/housing support sector. Please share them with us on social media using the hashtag #homecareday19.

There are several themes planned throughout the day including:

8 am – 10 am: Defining home care 
A celebration of what home care is and the crucial role it plays in our communities and health and social care systems

10 am – 12 pm: Home care heroes
A celebration of the many individuals who work in home care services and the impact they have on people’s lives through their commitment to care

12 pm – 2 pm: Real people, real lives
A celebration of the achievements and lives of the people who access home care support

2 pm – 4 pm: Changing times
A celebration of the many ways in which home care services are able to adapt to meet a changing policy and practice landscape

4 pm – 6 pm: The future of home care
A celebration of the opportunities provided through home care services and support for shaping the future of health and social care

homecare 19 flyer (2)

Scottish Care’s annual National Care Home Awards took place this year on Friday 15 November at the Hilton Hotel in Glasgow.

Huge congratulations to all our winners and finalists, and thank you to all our award sponsors!

#celebratecare #careawards19

Nutrition & Eating Well Award

Winner: Marie Hunter – Thorntoun Estate Nursing Home

Finalists: Iain Young – Murrayside Care Home & Lizzy McNielage – Rumbling Bridge Care Home

Pictured: Winner and Finalists with Michelle McManus and Sakib Rafiq – The Nursing Partnership (Award Sponsor)

Training, Learning & Staff Development Award

Winner: Bandrum Management Team – Bandrum Nursing Home

Finalists: Lynn Hewetson – Erskine Park Home & Margaret Campbell – Blar Buidhe Care Home

Pictured: Winner and Finalists with Michelle McManus and Ann Bain – Vision Care at Home (Award Sponsor)

Outstanding Achievement Award

Winner: Jane Williams – Florence House

Pictured: Winner’s daughter and Florence House staff members with Michelle McManus and Tom Speirs – Addleshaw Goddard (Award Sponsor)

Palliative & End of Life Care Practise Award

Winner: Eric Cordiner – Four Hills Care Home

Finalists: Greencross Care Home & Precious Time Project Team – Antonine House Care Home

Pictured: Winner and Finalists with Michelle McManus and Alan Baird – Scottish Care (Award Sponsor)

Carer of the Year

Winner: Lavinia Tanu – Balhousie Pitlochry

Finalists: Rosie Martinez – Jenny’s Well Care Home & Vicky Purves – Murray House, Queens House Care Home

Pictured: Winner and Finalists with Michelle McManus and Justin Hutchens – HC-One (Award Sponsor)

Care Home Service of the Year

Winner: Queens House (Kelso) Ltd.

Finalists: Morningside Care Home & Abbeyfield Ballachulish

Pictured: Winner and Finalists with Michelle McManus and Linda Meston – Simply Care Group (UK) Limited (Award Sponsor)

Special Recognition Award

Winner: Robert Kilgour – Renaissance Care

Pictured: Winner with Michelle McManus and Senga Currie – Quality Compliance Systems (Award Sponsor)

Ancillary & Support Staff Award

Winner: Jackie Kennedy – Erskine Park Home

Finalists: Christine Massie – Fordmill Nursing Home & Anne Hughes – Morningside Care Home

Pictured: Winner and Finalists with Michelle McManus and Elaine Rankin – Strategic Thinking (Award Sponsor)

Meaningful Activity Award

Winner: Activity Team – Charnwood Lodge Care Home

Finalists: Sheila Baxter – Beech Manor Care Home & Erskine Care Team – Erskine Park Home/ The Erskine Home

Pictured: Winner and Finalists with Michelle McManus and Andrew Coventry – Lyreco (Award Sponsor)

Emerging Talent Award

Winner: Ben Haddow – Balhousie Luncarty

Finalists: Ross Milne – The Birches & Anthony Mangonon – Berelands House Care Home

Pictured: Winner and Finalists with Michelle McManus and Gerry Hennessey – Meallmore Ltd. (Award Sponsor)

Management & Leadership Award

Winner: Yvonne Manson – Balhousie Care Group

Finalists: Kirsty Faulds – Kyle Court & Teresa Mangonon – Berelands House Care Home

Pictured: Winner and Finalists with Michelle McManus and Alex Wilson – Four Seasons Health Care (Award Sponsor)

Nurse of the Year Award

Winner: Jenny Coutts – Tor-Na-Dee Care Home

Finalists: Linda Mason – Laurels Lodge Care Home & Moira Craig – Hatton Lea

Pictured: Winner and Finalists with Michelle McManus and Salma Iqbal – Boots Care Services (Award Sponsor)

Specialist Service/Unit of the Year Award

Winner: The Oaks Care Home

Finalists: Meadowview Unit – Bandrum Nursing Home & Jenny’s Well Care Home

Pictured: Winner and Finalists with Michelle McManus and Fiona Fagan – Barchester Healthcare (Award Sponsor)

Positive Impact Award

Winner: Pat Gibson – Braeside House

Finalists: McLelland Unit – Douglas View & Diana Moles – Bandrum Nursing Home

Pictured: Winner and Finalists with Michelle McManus and Max Oerton – Compass Associates Ltd. (Award Sponsor)

Since 2018, the Care Inspectorate have been rolling out a revised methodology for inspecting care and support services. The core of the new approach is a quality framework for use in self-evaluation, scrutiny and improvement support which sets out the elements that will help answer key questions about the difference care is making to people and the quality and effectiveness of the things that contribute to those differences. This involves setting out what they expect to see in high-quality care and support provision in order to help allow improvement. Using a framework in this way develops a shared of what constitutes good care and support.

Work is currently underway on a joint framework for support services (care at home) and housing support services (including combined services). The Care Inspectorate wish to consult with the sector to ensure that the framework reflects key issues and areas of practice that will support positive outcomes for the people using this range of services. This will be an approach that will consider how they inspect services across the range of services under these registration categories.

Consultation events are being held at the following locations and we encourage you to participate. A session will be run at each location from 9.30am – 12.30pm. Places will be limited, so please book your place as soon as possible if you are interested.

Please contact Jane McIntosh at [email protected] to request a place at any of the following events:

• Tuesday 26 November 2019 at the Best Western Queens Hotel Dundee 160 Nethergate, Dundee, DD1 4DU
• Thursday 28 November 2019 at the Stirling Court Hotel, Airthrey Road, Stirling, Stirlingshire, FK9 4LA

 Please note: A further event will be arranged for Orkney to take place in January 2020.

Today, at the National Care Home Conference and Exhibition, CARE badge, the unifying symbol of pride and quality in care, is launched by Duncan Campbell, Director of everyLIFE Technologies Scotland, supported by Dr Donald Macaskill, Chief Executive of Scottish Care.

Under the slogan “It’s the small things that bring people together”, the CARE badge aims to highlight and respect nearly 1 million people delivering care in Scotland every day. This is made up of over 200,000 social care workers, accounting for 7.7% of all employment in Scotland. Unpaid carers are estimated to be 788,000, which is 14.5% of the Scottish population.

Dr Donald Macaskill: “I am delighted to be involved in the launch of the Care Badge in Scotland. The work of care is one of the most rewarding, invigorating yet at the same time challenging jobs in Scottish society. We owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to the thousands of women and men, both paid and unpaid carers, who every day make a difference to the lives of others. They are the soul of our nation and show us our communities at their best.  I hope we will see thousands of these badges being worn in villages, towns and communities across Scotland so that we can celebrate care. This is all about making care visible The valuing of the work of care is a mirror of a nation that cares.”

Duncan Campbell: “It’s time to raise the public profile of this crucial service and the appreciation of those providing care. So we’ve launched the CARE badge campaign in Scotland as a unifying symbol of pride and quality in care.”

In the UK as whole, there are over 2 million social care workers and 7 million more unpaid carers in the UK today. With each carer supporting at least one person, over a quarter of the UK population is either providing or receiving care outside of hospital every day.

The daily impact of care is even greater, given the significant number of family members of those working in or receiving care, as well as the suppliers and employees that assist the sector. Carers deliver this high-quality support each day, no matter if it’s a holiday for others or if the weather is adverse and travel is difficult. Unfortunately, they often do so without the public interest and support that other professionals reasonably enjoy.

The CARE badge CIC is administered and managed for free by everyLIFE Technologies who also donated the first 20,000 badges. To date, over 87,000 badges have been distributed. All profits from the sale of CARE badges are given to care related charities, suggested by care workers and carers and overseen by a CARE badge CIC charity committee.

www.thecarebadge.org

Press Information about everyLIFE Technologies, co-founders of CARE badge

everyLIFE Scotland:

everyLIFE Technologies, a leading provider of care planning and delivery software, is led in Scotland by Director, Duncan Campbell.

everyLIFEprovides the “PASSsystem” suite of care-planning software and apps to the UK’s homecare, reablement and residential care sectors. Provided on a SaaS basis since February 2015 and on a monthly payment structure, the PASSsystem is used by ~700 care businesses throughout the UK.

The PASSsystem digital care planning and management platform provides a single view of care records in real time on both desktop and mobile devices. From initial enquiry and service user assessment through medications (MAR charts), task changes to outcome reviews, PASSsystem automates care management processes while promoting safe medicines administration.

“openPASS” is a sister application that provides consented customers, family members and additional health professionals with inclusive access to real-time care plans and records in the PASSsystem.

Together, everyLIFE’s PASSsystem and openPASS are proven* to:

• better manage risk
• realise business efficiencies
• aid delivery of high-quality care
• demonstrate accountability to services users, families and regulators

everyLIFE is a Founding Member of the Care Software Providers Association (CASPA).

* Improving care through digital care planning: An evaluation of the PASSsystem by the Social Care Institute for Excellence. SCIE March 2019. Available at https://www.scie.org.uk/

Scottish Care:

Scottish Care is a membership organisation and the representative body for independent sector social care services in Scotland, covering private, charitable and not for profit social care organisations.

We represent over 400 organisations, which totals almost 1000 individual services, delivering residential care, nursing care, day care, care at home and housing support services.

Our membership includes organisations of varying types and sizes, amongst them single providers, small and medium sized groups, national providers and family run services.

Our members deliver a wide range of registered services for older people as well as those with long term conditions, learning disabilities, physical disabilities, dementia or mental health problems.

In Scotland, the independent social care sector contributes to:

• The employment of over 103,000 people, which is more than half of the total social services workforce, including approximately 5,000 nurses
• The provision of 88% of care home places for older people
• The delivery of over 55% of home care hours for older people

About the Care Home Conference:

Over 400 day delegates are expected to attend including care providers, local authority, NHS and Scottish Government colleagues.   This event is the only one of its kind in Scotland specifically for the care home sector and, whilst organised by Scottish Care, is very much a cross-sector event.  The conference is now in its twentieth year.

The conference contains a mixture of key contributions. Through creative, business-focused, practical and policy sessions, the event will focus on the significant role care home services play in ensuring individuals are able to remain connected to their communities and the criticality of their involvement in shaping Scotland’s future health and social care system.

The conference will address current challenges in the sector including workforce shortages, Brexit and the sustainability of the care home sector. There will also be a range of innovative approaches and tech products showcased to help people in their every day care practice.

A number of resources will be launched at the conference:

• New Scottish Care conference paper – Essential care: the critical role of care homes
• A hints and tips guide on supporting people with visual impairment from Royal Blind, in partnership with Scottish Care
• The formal launch of the CARE Badge in Scotland

The conference hashtags are #essentialcare and #carehome19

Genesis of the CARE badge:

The CARE badge was born on the 19th March 2019, while listening to Professor Martin Green, Chief Executive of Care England, highlight the challenges faced providing care and the unfortunate message that the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care inadvertently sends to those involved by only wearing an NHS lapel badge. The Chairman of everyLIFE Technologies, sitting in the audience turned to his colleague and said, “We should work with them to change that”.

How to get CARE badges: 

The CARE badge is sold to companies, charities and other organisations by the CARE badge CIC (community interest company). Badges are not sold to the public directly. Badge purchasers are both from the care community as well as national corporations and organisations, such as supermarkets, manufacturers, service industries etc., interested in supporting care workers and the carers in their own workforce.

Badges are distributed for free to employees and customers i.e. badges are not for resale. Badge purchasers are also given the right to use the CARE badge logo in their marketing materials to highlight how much they CARE.

Organisations with few employees or customer outlets can donate purchased badges to the CARE badge “pool”. These will be distributed on their behalf to individual carers for free by the CARE badge CIC at care-related events.

Order details can be found on www.thecarebadge.org. Badges cost £1 including P&P (plus VAT when applicable). There is a minimum order size of £100, with a choice of three fixing styles; butterfly pin, magnetic and brooch to suit both care and non-care settings.

All profits from selling CARE badges go to care-related charities:

The CARE badge CIC is administered and managed for free by everyLIFE Technologies who also donated the first 20,000 badges and 1,000 display trays. Costs incurred are therefore limited to the cost of badges, packaging and postage. All profits from the sale of CARE badges are distributed to care related charities, suggested and voted for online by care workers and carers and overseen by a CARE badge CIC charity committee.

Find out more: 

The website (www.thecarebadge.org) carries background, details of our growing community of partners, and how to order the CARE badge. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn are live with @theCAREbadge and #badge4CARE. Please post pictures of individuals and teams showing how much they CARE.

Feel free to get in touch by emailing [email protected].

Every single day I hear people discussing the sustainability of the care sector.

I hear it from providers, I hear it from commissioners, I hear it in the news, I hear it from our Politicians. But the quietest of all in this are those who are most affected. I almost never ever hear it from those who access care and support or indeed their loved ones who are also impacted by social care experience.

This voice is missing for many reasons, but mostly because it comprises of our most vulnerable. Those who may need support to articulate their desires clearly, or perhaps those who do not wish to rock the boat because they may have fought for what they receive, or even those who come to social care at a point of crisis. At best, it may find itself contained within a report presented to an Integrated Joint Board or kept in a silo perhaps because it is considered to pertain only to carers and not the holistic setting that a family is.

There is a stigma in accessing care and support. Those media headline grabbers and others on that bandwagon should put themselves in the shoes of those who may be in the demographic of the ‘ticking time bomb’ they write about. My own loved one describes a pervasive guilt about accessing something in case it prevents another, “perhaps younger person”, from accessing it. The guilt is so deep that I cannot even name them here.

And so we find ourselves (for a variety of reasons) in a place where people are coming to care much later than previously, which means they have more complex needs, are requiring a more intrusive intervention and face potentially life-limiting circumstances as they often first enter ‘the system’ because of an unplanned hospital admission.

This position then creates a ‘double whammy’, in both the here and now, and in the future, as without accurate data, we cannot accurately plan. For instance, how do we know how many care staff or nurses we might need, or need to train, if we do not have a true picture of those who may actually need care and support? And perhaps more importantly, how do we adapt for the future? For instance, by utilising and embedding preventative disruptors such as technology developed and applied with human rights in mind (guided perhaps by Scottish Care’s Human Rights Charter and Guidance for Technology).

Amidst this there remain Health and Social Care Partnerships who continue to dis-invest from social care in order to meet targets, without realising the wider impact upstream. Or worse still, to test out that impact in order to prove a point. And in doing so, completely missing the point. Health and Social care is about people’s lives and lifestyles, not about which funding body holds the pot of money.

The chronic and long-term under-funding of the care sector is undermining the human rights of the citizens of Scotland. It has created the conditions for marketplace competition – a drive for the lowest price rather than the high-quality care and support that the people of Scotland deserve, but which care providers continue to strive for. You don’t come into care if you don’t care.

An Ipsos Mori/Centre for Ageing Better survey conducted earlier this year explored user views on the worst things about getting old: 30% are concerned they won’t have enough money to live on, 26% losing mobility, 24% losing memory; 22% unable to do things they once could, 19% being lonely[1]

Quite frankly, we can do better. If people knew about the opportunities which lie in social care, this could be vastly reduced.

However, I write this blog in the week that the process for application to the National Procurement Framework for Care and Support is due to close. Scottish Care is eager to play our part in ensuring that the current model of commissioning and procurement is changed to ensure that it better reflects a rights-based, trust focused and relational approach to the care and support of older people. I personally have a history in disrupting commissioning practices from when I worked for a Local Authority in England (incidentally, joint funded by the NHS) leading to a model devised by working with families and providers, and resulting in 110% more people having access to care and support than previously at no additional cost.

Collaboration and co-production is where we work together to make the most out of what we have, and the bringing together of minds around a common vision and focus leads to realistic innovation, choice and control. Not incidentally a characteristic required of the market by the Self-Directed Support (Scotland) Act.

Scottish Care saw the initial development of the National Procurement Framework as offering the potential of reducing complexity, fostering relationships and addressing some of the sustainability issues. Yet the process has resulted in a Framework which is far from proportionate, requiring only the accountability of providers, it leads merely to a duplication of regulation and negotiation. An action in opposition of the trust-based relationships being nurtured and in effective community-based planning, and which led to the inherently more cost effective and equitable service provision which I describe above in my previous work.

There are of course other challenges with the framework, but that unwillingness to engage and work with the whole sector as equals is what mostly holds us back. In one recent review of a Health and Social Care partnership, their only comment on the contribution of the independent sector, was to list the number of care home beds and home care hours that they provide. This undermining of resource and opportunity and resistance is clearly articulated in the Audit Scotland report into integration which describes the challenges of culture change and the role of leadership in achieving and embedding best practice. After all, it is best practice which offers opportunity.

Whilst a solution is complicated, it is not unachievable.

In May I launched a paper on ‘Putting Human Rights into the Commissioning Cycle’ at the Scottish Care National Conference for Care at Home and Housing support in an attempt to put the person into planning. All too often Strategic Planning happens behind closed doors and based purely upon a set of statistics, or upon the results of community engagement which is tokenistic or piecemeal and therefore not representative. A shared vision grounded in human rights can support a whole community, including the significant contribution of independent care providers, to come together for good.

Above all however, that shared vision must be a positive one. A vision which recognises the value of our older people and the contribution that they and their families make, a vision which recognises the wider value of social in employing 1 in 10 Scots, and in contributing £3.4 billion to the economy, a vision which values the varied mix of care and support which offers real choice and control to those who may wish to access it.

At the recent Business in Parliament Conference, the First Minister said that “ … any country will only achieve it’s potential if it enables the people within it to achieve their own potential”.

Well, that time has come, who’s with me?

Karen Hedge

National Director, Scottish Care

 

[1] IpsosMori/Centre for Ageing Better/Feb 2019