Frailty and Falls – Living Well in Communities blog

How care homes in Argyll and Bute are working to reduce falls

Published on 20 December 201612 May 2017 by Living Well In CommunitiesLeave a comment

By Laura Dobie, Knowledge and Information Skills Specialist, Healthcare Improvement Scotland

On 5^th December I went along to the Argyll and Bute Care Homes Quality Improvement for Falls Prevention event. It was a really interesting day, and it was great to hear about the work that care home staff are doing to reduce falls and improve quality of life for their residents.

PDSAs and data

Dr Christine McArthur, Project Lead, introduced the day and Sheila Morris, Occupational Therapy Care Home Lead, gave an overview of Plan Do Study Act cycles and the role of data in improvement. She emphasised the importance of carrying out small tests of change and having a clear plan.

The project participants then had the opportunity to discuss a case study of a 72-year-old lady who had had a number of falls, considering risk factors such as polypharmacy and multiple complex conditions, and reviewing the data in the falls diary to identify whether there was a pattern to her falls.

The care home staff observed that people are increasingly coming in to care homes with more mobility problems and multiple conditions and co-morbidities. Sheila commented that everyone in the care home sector is at risk of falling and should have a multifactorial falls assessment. Continue reading “How care homes in Argyll and Bute are working to reduce falls” →

Scottish Ambulance Service Falls and Frailty Pathways Action Group first meeting

Published on 13 December 201613 December 2016 by Living Well In CommunitiesLeave a comment

On 25th November 2016 the Living Well in Communities team from Healthcare Improvement Scotland’s Improvement Hub (ihub) supported the first meeting of the Active and Independent Living Improvement Programme (AILIP) and Scottish Ambulance Service Falls and Frailty Action Group. This Storify summarises the discussions from the day. Presentations and other resources can be accessed on the Falls and Bone Health Community site.

There’s No Place Like Home: Living Well in Communities at the NHSScotland Event

Published on 23 June 201624 August 2016 by Living Well In CommunitiesLeave a comment

The Living Well in Communities team held two workshops at the NHSScotland Event, which took place at the SECC on 14th-15th June 2016. These sessions explored initiatives from Health and Social Care Partnerships across Scotland that are helping people to spend more time at home or a homely setting that would otherwise have been spent in hospital.

We’ve put together a Storify of the tweets from the sessions.

The sessions were chaired by Susanne Miller, Chief Officer for Strategy, Planning and Commissioning and Chief Social Work Officer for Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership. June Wylie, Head of Implementation and Improvement at Healthcare Improvement Scotland, introduced the Living Well in Communities portfolio and frontline speakers from across the different Living Well workstreams and related areas of work:

High Resource Individuals – Anne Palmer, Programme Manager, Connected Care, NHS Borders
Frailty and Falls – Rebekah Wilson, Ayrshire and Arran Falls Lead and Falls Community Connector.
Anticipatory Care Planning – Janette Barrie, Nationa Clinical Lead (Nursing) Anticipatory Care Planning, Healthcare Improvement Scotland
Housing – Maureen Cameron, Manager, Lochaber Care & Repair
Intermediate Care and Reablement – Lorna Dunipace (Day 1), Interim Head of Transformational Change (Older People), and Christine Ashcroft (Day 2), Service Manager, Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership
Palliative Care – Caroline Sime, Research Fellow University of the West of Scotland and Ardgowan Hospice

Here are some of the themes from the workshops: Continue reading “There’s No Place Like Home: Living Well in Communities at the NHSScotland Event” →

Working with care homes to reduce falls: Argyll and Bute Health and Social Care Partnership

Published on 17 May 201627 May 2016 by Living Well In Communities1 Comment

By Laura Dobie, Knowledge and Information Skills Specialist, Healthcare Improvement Scotland

Argyll and Bute Health and Social Care partnership has been holding a series of quality improvement workshops for care home staff, in collaboration with Scottish Care. I went along to one of their workshops with care home staff in Dunoon on 10^th May to find out more about the work that the partnership is doing with care homes.

Background

All 20 care homes in Argyll and Bute are signed up to a quality improvement project to reduce falls. Funded by the Integrated Care Fund, and supported by health professionals in each locality, the project aims to support care home staff to address falls risks in their care home. A particular emphasis is on improving physical activity for health and wellbeing.

The quality improvement workshops

Dr Christine McArthur, NHS Highland Coordinator Prevention and Management of Falls, Jane Howe, Quality Improvement Manager, and Kirsty Brown, Assistant Practitioner (Physiotherapy), facilitated the workshops. The team worked collaboratively with Scottish Care to develop events which met the needs of care home staff. The care homes requested a series of smaller local workshops, rather than one big event, as some staff do not drive and it was easier them to attend local events.

The team held workshops in Bute, Oban, Campbeltown, Dunoon and Helensburgh. Having dedicated events for care home staff and small group sizes ensured that all participants were able to contribute to discussions and ask the team for advice. Continue reading “Working with care homes to reduce falls: Argyll and Bute Health and Social Care Partnership” →

Moving From QI As An Activity To QI As Culture

Published on 21 January 201628 October 2016 by Living Well In CommunitiesLeave a comment

What is this event?

Bringing the world together to help improve the NHS.

The NHS Transformathon is a free, online event bringing together global health and care staff and service users to connect, share and learn from each other.

The NHS Transformathon will showcase the latest innovations, practices and methodologies to inspire you with ways to make change happen. As a global event, you’ll be able to connect with world-leading change experts and people of different disciplines from many countries, each sharing experiences of successes and lessons learned.

What are we doing?

Our presentation, Moving from QI as an activity to a QI culture, is the only opportunity you’ll have to hear from Scotland. We will focus on our quality improvement journey using an example from our older people’s improvement programme and share our experiences of the route to integrated health and social care.

Speakers_transformathon

Ruth Glassborow, Director of Safety and Improvement, June Wylie, Head of Implementation and Improvement and Karen Goudie and Geraldine Marsh, Improvement Advisors with the Older People’s Care team at Healthcare Improvement Scotland will present.

Continue reading “Moving From QI As An Activity To QI As Culture” →

Using Twitter To Promote Our Events

Published on 4 December 201526 May 2016 by Living Well In CommunitiesLeave a comment

For Living Well in Later Life and Living Well with Frailty (25^th and 26^th October 2015) we were keen to have a strong presence and engagement on social media, and we were aware that in order to build momentum, we were going to have start this work well in advance.

The challenge

Twitter is an invaluable tool for communicating with a broad range of audiences. However, there is a problem with information overload: it is a constant stream of real-time information and people don’t necessarily check every tweet on their timelines. As people are faced with a constant flow of tweets, it’s vitally important to ensure that your posts are engaging, and that you post at different times of the day to capture different audiences: it isn’t enough to post something once and hope that people will see it.

The beginnings of a plan

We knew that we would have to tweet our messages multiple times to capture as large an audience as possible. However, we also knew that it wouldn’t be enough to simply keep reposting the same tweet again and again.

This was the beginning of our Twitter plan. We looked at social media plans for previous events as a model for our activities and the key messages from our event communications plan that we wanted to get across on social media and started putting together a strategy to set out what we were going to tweet and when we were going to tweet it.

We gave careful thought to the different reasons why people would want to attend our events and incorporated different hooks, such as questions, in our tweets to attract attention and start building hype around the events. We also included pictures and relevant hashtags wherever possible to increase the visibility of our tweets and encourage retweets.

Scheduling was very important: we wanted to ensure that we were tweeting when our followers were most likely to see our posts, so we used Tweriod to find out when the majority of our followers were online and planned our activity accordingly.

A particular challenge was that we were promoting two linked events at the same time, and needed to ensure that we were promoting both equally. We addressed this by promoting each event on alternate days, starting two weeks before the events.

It is useful to be able to tap into people’s personal networks, so in the two working days prior to the event we planned tweets to promote the plenary sessions and workshops from each event which incorporated speakers’ Twitter handles to encourage them to retweet these posts to their own networks.

Continue reading “Using Twitter To Promote Our Events” →