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Care Home News
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| News and views on the UK Care Home Sector |
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IT grants available to care homes
The Social Care Institute for excellence is running a grants programme to improve information technology infrastructure of care homes. A total of £12m is available to install hardware and software, and 359 applications have been made in just two days. Proposals should show how the IT solution will benefit residents.
Care Homes that are interested should [...]
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CQC Praises and Damms
“Ratings for providers have .. improved, however one in six providers are only “poor” or “adequate”. Says CQC. A major new report from the Care Quality Commission provides a detailed breakdown of adult social care services in England, including figures on usage of services broken down by quality ratings.
“The proportion of care homes, home care [...]
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Brown promises to extend free social care
In todays Queens Speech, Gordon Brown is to promise further extension of free social care to the elderly. The care package would cover both domicilliary as well as care home based support and apply to the most need. The proposals would be funded by local and health authorities and are currently costed at £700m.
What is [...]
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Find the best care home for Archers Jack Woolley
“Peggy is struggling to find a care home for her husband, Jack as he faces the tragic mental decline of Dementia, on the Radio 4 show ‘The Archers’. The sensitive handling of the story line has been widely praised, but the show has only touched on the difficulty of actually finding a good care home. [...]
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Tories and Labour spar with elderly care pledges
The two largest parties have spent the week courting voters with promises to relieve the financial burden of paying for care by middle income voters. We take a quick run through their proposals.
The Tory plan allows for an £8k payment at age 65, as a one off insurance payment in exchange for the costs of care [...]
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DoH: “Half of care home patients suffer drug errors”
Channel 4 News reports that at DoH study has found frequent mistakes in the handling of medication at care homes, with as many as half of all residents affected. The study ran for over two years and involved direct observation of medication administration within 55 care homes.
The report found errors in several key areas
* administration errors [...]
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Eight pillars of care home best practice
Through it’s support of the My Home Life initiative, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have carried out a piece of work to set out best practice in the running of care homes. With the help of sixty expert advisor’s and taking evidence from residents, they have produced a report setting out the Eight pillars of best [...]
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Care Home closures – a necessary evil?
Yet another care home closure hits the headlines. This time it is Underhill House in Wolverhamton. The council says that updating the home would cost £20m and it is better to move existing residents out. A matter of considerable distress for a small number of older people is a public relations nightmare for [...]
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Summary rationale for the project |
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Written by Richard Phillips
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The scheme aims to improve the effectiveness of residential rehabilitation in the UK by collating and sharing information about the outcomes, effectiveness and quality of these services.
To explain why this work is needed, we must consider how the residential rehab sector is structured.
Residential rehab is purchased, usually on a client-by-client basis, in a market place of public, private and not for profit providers. Providers offer their services to purchasers who work with clients (and on behalf of the public purse) to make decisions about placements.
There are usually a small number of people making these purchasing decisions within each DAT and (taking account of the size of the drug treatment system as a whole) the number of actual placements per DAT area is small.
The purchaser (usually a care manager) has relatively little information on which to base his or her decisions. In particular, they know little about the actual performance of providers. Even if they take the trouble to record and analyse data for all their placements, the number of people involved is too small to make general conclusions and comparisons. Even providers of services know little about their performance compared to other providers.
This poor market knowledge on the part of providers and purchasers has consequences: - Care managers often make placement decisions based on arbitrary criteria such as habit or brand loyalty.
- Providers make decisions on price based on similarly arbitrary criteria such as historical position.
- The lack of clarity about outcomes undermines efforts to improve quality.
- There is a poor relationship between the service provided, the problem severity of clients, price and outcome.
These market inefficiencies mean that excellent services sometimes close, terrible services sometimes stay open, fewer clients get the treatment they need and the residential sector as a whole under-performs.
A partial solution to these problems is to radically increase the flow of information and market knowledge between purchasers and providers. This is the solution being pursued by the Rehab Outcomes Project: - Collecting and collating outcome and activity data
- Feeding this back into the market to support decision-making by both purchasers and providers.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 02 June 2008 20:24 )
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