Reducing hospital admissions: a new integrated model for care homes

Sally Roberts is Lead Nurse (Quality and Partnerships) at Walsall Clinical Commissioning Group. Here she describes work undertaken jointly by Walsall CCG and Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust, which has led to the implementation of a new integrated health care model within care homes.

Walsall’s new model of care has enabled the whole care home sector to raise standards, measurably improve outcomes for residents in care homes and reduce unnecessary hospital admissions.

Our work commenced in earnest with the nursing home sector over three years ago, at a time when there was increasing suspension of admissions, often due to poor quality and patient safety issues; these reduced market capacity and choice for people, and created financial uncertainty for some smaller independent homes. Care home managers reported in several forum meetings that they were struggling with poor staff retention, disrupting stability of care, leading to ineffective planning and viability of the home in the long term. In addition, the lack of proactive management of patients resulted in a high number of avoidable hospital admissions.

FallSafe: are culture clashes good for us?

Frances Healey was clinical co-lead of the FallSafe project and is currently Senior Head of Patient Safety Intelligence, Research and Evaluation at NHS England. She tweets at @FrancesHealey

This week the extended evaluation of FallSafe is available online in Ageing and Ageing. FallSafe was generously funded by the Health Foundation as part of its Closing the Gap programme, and at the programme’s closing celebration I was asked to present on what we had learned. The essence of my answer was ‘culture clashes are good for us’ – something that, with further time for reflection, I still believe.