Care Experience Tool – Living Well in Communities blog

Our recent Neighbourhood Care Steering Group took place on 21^st November at The Studio, Glasgow. This session focused on measurement and provided an opportunity for our test sites to update each other on their progress and any challenges encountered since our last meeting.

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Care Experience Measurement

Our public partners, recently attended training on Care Experience, delivered by the Person Centred Care team in the hope that each public partner will link up with an active test site and assist them in capturing care experience in their local area. A further training session will happen in the New Year and those from the HSCP pilot sites are welcome to attend.

The group was shown an example of a “Care Experience Map” and asked if this would be helpful in developing one for each active site, with 1 or 2 patients being interviewed (Aberdeen City, Scottish Borders and NHS Highland). The Care Experience Maps would be used to capture the current care received from Neighbourhood Care teams, and could highlight opportunities for quality improvement work for local teams.

Knowledge Hub

The Steering Group have previously expressed that they would like to have a platform to share information around Neighbourhood Care in between the Steering Group meetings. As a result, the Living Well in Communities (LWIC) team have created a Knowledge Hub site. It provides a chance for those interested in testing similar models to network and share ideas and will be open to all roles in all areas.

The LWiC team had brain stormed these folders and suggested some sub folders, as well as uploading a few examples of documents that sites may find useful to share. Everyone was invited to “test” out the page and offer suggestions that would help improve the page before it gets shared more widely with local test site teams. Sites were asked to feedback their suggestions to the LWiC team and nominate a member of their team as ‘administrator’ who will be responsible for updating and uploading documents to their site’s folder.

Measurement

A small NC Measurement sub-group formed on the back of the last Steering Group and met to develop a set of common measures for all sites based on the 7 common themes of measurement:

Re-ablement
Customer satisfaction/experience
Staff satisfaction
Procedures
Workforce
Professional Autonomy
Community impact

The steering group was briefed on the 10 suggested measures and asked if they would be both useful and easy for Neighbourhood Care teams to measure. Some of the measures included:

“The percentage of time spent by nurses and carers that:

is directly person facing time or Involves person centred activities”

“The average number of team/staff members visiting each person per day/per week”

“The percentage of attendees who join the regular team meetings that discuss and plan care/case load”

“Number of steps in a process that require approval to be sought [before a neighbourhood care team/control group and with a neighbourhood care team”? I.e. “How many barriers removed?”

All suggestions were useful and would be of particular interest to team members, but some may prove challenging to capture. Neighbourhood Care Test Sites will now test ways to capture some of these measures and have been asked to help define them more precisely.

For any further information on any of the above, please feel free to contact one of the team:

hcis.livingwell@nhs.net

On the 3^rd October we held our latest Neighbourhood Care Steering Group at the Edinburgh Training & Conference Venue. There was great representation from the Neighbourhood Care test sites [including Western Isles, NHS Highland, Aberdeen City, Scottish Borders, Stirling & Clacks and Cornerstone] as well as national supportive partners [Scottish Government, Buurtzorg Britain & Ireland, SSSC, Care Inspectorate and NES].

The aim of the day was to openly discuss the challenges and support that National Partners and test sites can offer each other.

Defining our Measures

Thomas Monaghan (HIS) and Fee Hodgkiss (Scottish Government) revisited the vision set out in 2016 for Neighbourhood Care, in a letter from Scottish Government. Both discussed whether the principles are still relevant today, and what they mean in a Scottish context. They offered the opinion that as a set of principles, they were solid and aligned with the pillars of providing person-centred, ‘good, old-fashioned’ care. The group agreed that the principles still applied in a Scottish context and there was a general consensus that the principle of person-centred care was most important.

Logic Model-Measurement Mapping

The group were led through a cross mapping exercise carried out by the ihub team that links the original desired outcomes and impact of the programme’s logic model with the current measures being undertaken in local test sites.

The measures were themed into six categories:

Re-ablement
Person satisfaction/experience
Staff satisfaction
Procedural tasks
Workforce structure
Professional autonomy/self-management

The exercise highlighted that there may be areas of measurement that were not currently being recorded. Key to this part of the morning was to facilitate agreement on potential measures for Neighbourhood Care Teams at a national level, and the group discussed this and what measures could potentially ‘fill the gaps’ if necessary.

There was consensus within the group that the themes were good. The group also highlighted the need for “Third Sector/communities capacity building contribution” to be added as a 7^th theme for measurement.

The group agreed that further discussion focussing on the measures within the document would be of benefit, and a small sub-group will be formed to carry this out. This group will meet and develop a set of common measures for all sites based on these (now seven) highlighted themes before the next steering group in November. If you have any suggestions, please get in touch with your local lead or contact hcis.livingwell@nhs.net

Challenges and Support

The group was asked to reflect on the nine common themes of challenges that sites were reporting and were asked to consider opportunities for peer support and/or offers of support from national partners.

The group selected three themes and spent the remainder of the afternoon discussing these:

Number 4: Ability to empower teams to be self-managing

Number 2: Competing Priorities and Communicating

Number 7: Lack of platform / regular reporting structure

“Self-organising” came up as a key challenge being faced by the test sites. The group agreed there is potential for some rich learning that could be shared from Buurtzorg Britain and Ireland and Cornerstone’s approach and experience with this.

HIS will work alongside Britain Buurtzorg and Ireland and Cornerstone to develop a series of recorded WebExes that will provide further information on this (and other fundamental topics) and will share these on our website. Watch out for a programme of dates for these, which we’ll communicate soon.

Care Experience Tool

In order to support sites to measure ‘experience’ (versus satisfaction) a Care Experience Tool (developed in collaboration between the LWiC and Evidence and Indicators team within HIS) was shared in a draft form. The tool is a set of open questions that aim to explore compassionate care, and are directly related to the new Health and Social Care Standards. Aberdeen City, Stirling and Clackmannanshire and Cornerstone were interested in testing out the tool. It’s great that our public partners have agreed to support sites with this work.

The group also discussed the practical use of the tool and further training and development dates will be planned.

Having a platform for regular sharing/reporting

The Steering Group expressed that having the opportunity to meet, chat and share ideas, knowledge and offers of support is always extremely valuable. Steering groups only happen every 6-8 weeks, so the LWiC team agreed to set up a webpage for the group on the Knowledge Hub. This will be a platform for sites to share information around Neighbourhood Care in between meetings and will be open to all roles in all areas. We look forward to sharing more details around this in the future.

For any further information on any of the above, please feel free to contact one of the team:

hcis.livingwell@nhs.net