PAGE 4 | THE CARER DIGITAL | ISSUE 69
The Social Care Sector Needs To Embrace Condition-Based Practice Models If It Is To Solve The Dementia Crisis
By Terry Lawlor, QCS, Chief Product Officer (www.qcs.co.uk)
“Dementia robs millions of people of their memories, independence and dignity… The world is failing people with dementia, and that hurts all of us…” This was just one of the hard-hitting messages issued by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the DirectorGeneral of the World Health Organization (WHO), late last month to coincide with the launch of a new report showing the number of people with dementia will increase by 40 percent by 2030.* In the UK, where more than 850,000 people** currently live with dementia, meeting the many complex challenges surrounding the condition is listed as one of the NHS’s top ten priorities, while last year the government launched the ‘Prime Minister’s Challenge on Dementia 2020’. But, in the social care sector, and in the health sector for that matter, there is an additional obstacle. When supporting people with dementia, care and health professionals often experience a gaping chasm between the theory of caring for someone with dementia and the practice of actually doing so.
QCS DEMENTIA CENTRE: PUTTING CONDITION-BASED CARE AT THE HEART OF THE PRODUCT Quality Compliance Systems (QCS), the leading provider of content, guidance and standards for the social care sector, and the organisation that I work for, was keen to address this gap that exists between theory and practice. As a company that prides itself on providing care professionals with the right content tools at the right time so they can focus all their efforts on delivering the best possible care, QCS created QCS Dementia Centre. My role, as the company’s Chief Product Officer, is to work with industry-leading experts – such as Jackie Pool, QCS’s Dementia Care Champion – to create a highly intuitive interface that care services can access across all channels. How does QCS Dementia Centre provide a solution to the dementia knowledge and skills gap? In a nutshell, it offers social care workers a pioneering set of tools and extensive multi-media resources to help them transform the assessment and management of care provision for those living with dementia.
QCS DEMENTIA CENTRE: MOVING DEMENTIA TRAINING FROM THE ‘WHAT’ TO THE ‘HOW’. From a product perspective the biggest sea-change is that Dementia Centre has transformed QCS from a compliance provider to one that specialises in supplying condition-based care guidance. In this respect, Dementia Centre shifts the dial. It enables care workers to not only ask ‘what do I need to do?’ but also ‘how do I do it?’ and for the hub to provide the answers. This is what makes QCS Dementia Centre unique. How is this achieved? Dementia Centre resources include the worldrenowned PAL Instrument, a Mental Capacity Act Assessment tool, a QCS Dementia Compliance Index and a library of digital content. To begin with, these resources allow a professional care team to understand each person’s individual cognitive threshold and assess mental capacity. Once this has been established, using the PAL Instrument and a selection of nine specifically curated purposeful practice guides, Dementia Centre teaches care workers how to acquire new skills. Most importantly, a reflective practice tool, which enables a supervisor to monitor and evaluate progress, gives care workers the confidence to flourish, while at the same time ensuring that they meet and exceed the highest industry standards.
CLOSING THE SKILLS AND TRAINING GAP Such an innovative and pioneering approach to dementia care can, I believe, go a long way towards narrowing the divide between theory and practice. And there’s an urgent need to achieve this, if statistics are anything to go by. A report by Skills for Care Workforce, for example, states that only 44 percent of care staff in England are recorded as having had training in dementia.*** In domiciliary care too, the gap between theory and practice is also evident. A study conducted by The Alzheimer’s Society in 2016 found that a third of homecare workers receive no specialist dementia training. The report also found examples of domiciliary care staff refusing to make additional visits to someone with dementia as they felt unprepared and helpless. Finally, it revealed that only 2 percent of service users surveyed felt that homecare professionals had enough dementia training.**** These statistics also make the case for a condition-based support approach. Reading between the lines, they show that to really enhance the quality of care that carers deliver, the level of dementia training required needs to transcend best practice guidance and regulatory standards.
QCS’S LONG-TERM AIM QCS has long been associated with helping organisations to fulfil and indeed surpass their regulatory and compliance requirements. However,
at the same time, we feel very strongly that if the monumental challenges presented by dementia are to be met head on, the bar for support needs to be raised even higher. Therefore, in addition to filling the skills gap, we have a long-term vision, which we believe to be eminently achievable. It is to build an online community of dementia experts. We believe that Dementia Centre will become a wellspring for learning and a central hub for sharing best practice content. By leveraging Dementia Centre’s multimedia channels, we want to actively encourage experts from a range of different backgrounds, with varying skillsets, to share their knowledge and experience with front-line workers. From a product standpoint, if we are to create such an empowering resource, we need to put in place the technological infrastructure to support growth. That means using state-of-the-art software to help contributors to showcase and share their content in the most dynamic and powerful way. Technology can also help to ensure that people are able to network and work together seamlessly and effectively to deliver the best possible dementia care. That said, it is the content, the people and the collective desire to affect lasting change that will always be the greatest driver. At QCS, laying the foundations to nurture this potentially game-changing environment has - and always will be - our ultimate goal. For the 55 million people across the world currently living with dementia, creating a core resource that brings together a community of experts, all of whom are highly skilled in looking at the disease through this novel lens, can't come soon enough. To find out more about QCS Dementia Centre or to purchase a subscription, please visit www.qcs.co.uk/dementia-centre or contact QCS’s team of advisors on 0333-405-3333 or email: sales@qcs.co.uk. * Reuters Number of people with dementia set to jump 40% to 78 mln by 2030 –WHO Author: Stephanie Nebehay Date: 02, September, 2021 ** Alzheimer’s Society Facts for the media https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/about-us/news-and-media/facts-media *** Skills for Care The state of the adult social care sector and the workforce in England https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/adult-social-care-workforce-data/Workforceintelligence/documents/State-of-the-adult-social-care-sector/The-state-of-the-adult-socialcare-sector-and-workforce-2020.pdf **** Fix: Dementia: Care homecare Fix Dementia Care homecare
The Recent Funding Proposals: A Missed Opportunity For Digital Transformation In Social Care By Daniel Casson, Care England’s Adviser on digital transformation. The government has put forward proposals for social care funding. Of the £36bn promised from the Health and Social Care levy over the next three years, social care is due to receive £5.4bn or £1.8bn/annum. This recent announcement by the Prime Minister represents a missed opportunity, an opportunity to promote greater health and social care integration … and especially integration via digital transformation. It is acknowledged that investing in social care will save the health and care system money. Investment in new technology to ensure people’s ongoing quality of life will help avoid the need for acute intervention to repair people’s health. The short-term funding fix proposed means that social care will not have the funding to invest in technology and digital transformation to make the crucial efficiencies to benefit the health and care system. Let’s follow this line of thinking. NHS England reports that residents in care homes account for 185,000 emergency hospital admissions each year and 1.46 million emergency bed days, with 35-40% of emergency admissions deemed potentially avoidable. By improving the digital infrastructure and allowing appropriate access to people’s data in care home settings, care staff would be able to provide even betterinformed, personalised care which in turn would help avoid emergency hospital admissions. If those 1.46 million days could be cut by 25% that would save the NHS over £0.5bn. Let’s take another example. It is estimated that a hip replacement costs about £11,000 (https://www.privatehealth.co.uk/conditions-and-treatments/hip-replacement-total/costs/); the related costs to the NHS are difficult to ascertain accurately, however a figure of about £8,000 might cover it. There are about
40,000 hip replacements on the NHS annually (https://www.njrcentre.org.uk/njrcentre/Healthcareproviders/Accessing-the-data/StatsOnline/NJR-StatsOnline), so this equates to £760m. If falls could be reduced by half, the NHS could potentially safe almost £0.5bn which is the tip of the iceberg of what could be achieved. One company, Ally Labs, which promotes its acoustic monitoring solution, has evidence to show it can reduce falls by 55% in care homes. Doesn’t that make you dream of the potential efficiencies which can be created in the system? The value created by care providers, employing technology to give even greater quality, generates value for the whole health and care system. The issue is that the value created in one part of the health and care system is then realised in another part of the system[1]… which means that there is a clear case for place-based funding rather than siloed sector-based funding in health and social care. There are many areas where implementation of technology in social care on a consistent basis could promote quality of life, create efficiencies for care and health organisations and save the system so much money. This requires some real forward planning, incentivisation, and there needs to be investment in technology to realise the savings. The only way to make our healthcare system affordable in the future is by ensuring that people who require care and support, whether they be working age adults or older people, have as high a quality of life which will lead to system-wide savings. There needs to be money for social care organisations to invest in this sort of life quality improving technology. The recent publications by NHSX (What Good Looks Like and Who Pays for What) deal with health first, and the premise is that social care will be dealt with next, much as the Prime Minister has chosen to do in his recent funding proposals. Surely the time is right to turn this model on its head and invest in digital transformation in social care to realise the long-term efficiencies and value creation strategies that need to be promoted.