Within Cambridgeshire and Peterborough there are 176 care homes which are supported by Primary Care. Following a number of our care homes being placed in special measures we as a team had to adapt quickly and bring an innovative approach to working amid rapid change to align with our ICB roles and vision. The aim of our project was to develop a dashboard to monitor all care homes within the ICS for quality and safety of medicines management, and to target support for improvement in medicines management to appropriate homes.
The quality visited have wrought positive outcomes such as fostering better communication between care home vs GP vs community pharmacy. We are breaking down silo working and this has helped the care home staff to gain knowledge of where they can obtain support relating to medicines. Our patients will be the main beneficiaries as the work will help to reduce medicines related risks thus reducing medicines related admissions and strain on NHS services such as 111 and Emergency Departments.
Feedback from care home providers after our quality visits has been positive. Statements made during our visits such “This has been helpful”, “I am more confident with our CQC inspection, I didn’t know we needed that, thanks for letting me know”, thanks for improving relationships between us, and thanks for your support and its nice to know the areas we need to improve on”. These statements give as assurance as a team that the impact we are making is really worthwhile.
We anticipate that the support we are providing to care homes to implement policies and procedures to improve the safe use of medicines should eventually lead to improved CQC ratings.
