Care home action plan
Improving personalisation in care homes
This care home action plan is for managers and owners of care homes for older people. It will help you to:
- Build a shared understanding of what personalisation (or person-centred care) means in a care home setting
- Identify and plan practical improvements that will make your home more personalised
It has been designed to also be used for wider groups of people including those with complex conditions. Care home managers will be able to use the tool to support good conversations with residents and staff, and identify the improvements that will make the most difference to people’s quality of life.
This care home action plan will help you explore what personalisation means for care homes and more importantly help you have conversations together about where you are now and what you could do to improve things.
As a strategic commissioner for an older population, I am always looking to identify person centred tools for providers. This toolkit gives a real life, accessible way for us to think about how care homes can improve how they care and support the community who live there. It provides a positive, meaningful and accessible tool to measure the quality of care.
Di Manning, Head of Commissioning (Adult Social Care and Provider Management), Serving Richmond and Wandsworth Councils
We’ve learned from our work with the Enhanced Health in Care Homes vanguards that personalised approaches are critical to delivering high quality support for people living in care homes. This tool is great for commissioners and care home managers interested in embedding person centred care. Commissioners should be looking to use it to assist their discussions with local care homes and support the move to making personalised approaches business as usual in the sector.
Emily Wighton, Senior Manager (Enhanced Health in Care Homes), NHS England
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How to use the care home action plan Open
You can complete the questions online but you may find it more helpful to print out the pdf version and use a paper copy instead using the download on this page. Sitting together with people without being distracted by a computer screen can help create better conversations.
Once you've finished, you can feed your answers into the online tool to record your conversations and check your progress. The system will record your answers and save them for next time so you can build up a picture over time of how you’re doing against each of the themes. You can do one or two sections at a time if that is more manageable.
Once you have explored a topic and come up with your best answer to the question you can use the forward planning section to carry on the conversation and work out what you can do collectively to improve things.
For more information on how to use the care home action plan, please refer to the Care home action plan - user guide download on the bottom of this page.
Tips on using the care home action plan
To get the best out of this action plan:
- Get different people involved in answering the questions.
- You can do this in groups or separately. If you do it separately, make sure to compare how you answered the questions afterwards and see where the differences are.
- If you’re stuck for time or you just want to test it out, just pick the areas that feel most relevant to you.
- Whatever you do will be saved so you can always come back to other sections at a later time.
- If people's answers differ a lot then you may want to think together about why that is happening. Just exploring this on its own can help people to feel more included and build a stronger positive culture in your home
- Be honest in your assessment but it doesn’t matter so much where you are now. The important thing is what you do next. This action plan will help you bring people together to focus on how to improve things
- Discuss where you are now in depth. The next step is to identify what you could do to improve things.
- Think about what's practical and possible to do quickly first – ideally in the next 48 hours – to make a first step towards change.
- Work out simple ways you can measure progress and share the progress you are making.
- Share responsibilities for making change happen. Creating a small group to take forward the changes and drive it forward will increase your chances of success.
Make the most of this action plan by:
- Using it on a regular basis – every 3 or 6 months so that you can review changes that have happened, identify progress and plan what to do next
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Video Transcript – Transition Open
Reflections from:
Simon Stockton - Strategic Consultant in Health and Social Care
Beverley Milson - Manager, The Anchorage, Cleesthorpes
Hayley Bemrose - Deputy Manager, The Anchorage, Cleesthorpes
Emma Fleet - Daughter of Fred Fleet
Rachel Fitton - Risby Hall, Bury St Edmunds
Vicky Clarke - Contracts Manager, Surrey Continuing Healthcare
Carol Taylor - Manager, Garth House care home
Dilly - Bury St EdmundsSimon Stockton: This resource is aimed at people who work and who live in care homes. It's a self reflection tool to encourage people to have discussions about all the good stuff that they're doing at the moment to help people have a really good quality of life.
The resource is something that you can use on a one-to-one basis or you can use it in groups to have a conversation about different aspects of personalization. So for instance we have sections on what it means to move into a care home, what needs to be done to make that a really good experience for the individual themselves but also for their family and for the staff involved.
And you can use one of those sections on its own or you can use the tool in its entirety to build up a holistic picture of how well you're doing in your home to give people the best possible quality of life from the best possible experience.Beverley Milson: On a day to day basis the home is extremely busy and you never know what's going to hap-pen every day is so different. And I think just taking a moment, having a bit of time, going back to basics to ensure that the latter part of their lives is the best it possibly can be and that to me that's what it's all about.
Hayley Bemrose:We started going through the tool yesterday and it actually got us really in a deep conversation and the time just absolutely run away.
Getting families involved is is key and I think using that resource gets us speaking with the families and we get that feedback from them as well so it's really good.Emma Fleet: It's nice to come in and hear "oh, Fred's done this today, and he said this today and yesterday he was doing this" and it's them little things and the interaction and knowing it's a two-way relation-ship bought into one and I think that's the most important thing.
Rachel Fitton: The little things are everything that makes the difference, it's about recognizing the individuality and recognizing people as people.
Carol Taylor: It allows you to look at how well you're develop-ing, look at ways you can change things and look at how you're progressing.
Vicky Clarke: To be able to use this tool to maybe sit down and see how they can make things better not just for the residents and the families, perhaps also for the staff as well, I think this tool would be really important.
Dilly: When he turns to me and says darling I love you it's worth coming just for those words, just for that moment.
Simon Stockton: At the heart of this tool is a real desire to share with people who are living and working in care homes the real power that they have to improve people's lives on a day to day basis.
So what I would say to anyone working in a care home is thinking of using this is give it a go.