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NELFT wins national patient safety award for care home training for Significant 7 project
We are delighted to be the winner of the Patient Safety in Community award announced at the national Patient Safety Awards event on 4 July. The award was for our Significant 7 - Signs of Deterioration for Care Homes work. The project has been developed in collaboration with Barking and Dagenham, Havering and Redbridge Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs).
We spoke to one of the driving forces behind Significant 7, Geraldine Rodgers, nurse consultant for frailty and long term conditions, and asked her to explain more about the project and why it’s receiving such accolades.
Following on from an audit in Emergency Departments (ED), it highlighted that many of the patients admitted there were from a care home setting. On speaking to care home staff they felt we needed to concentrate efforts on the prevention of deterioration in care home residents in order to prevent attendance to EDs where appropriate. NELFT along with BHR CCGs worked together on this project.
The Significant 7 Training Package was developed following research with care homes, hospital doctors and local authorities for over six months and we identified this opportunity to support care home staff. The training package takes into account the needs of care home workers and the barriers which we had learned about, training this group of people. It includes a toolkit to support care workers to identify the health needs of residents and an interactive training session delivered by healthcare professionals in the care home setting.
The training supports staff to identify deterioration earlier, resulting in residents receiving care at home rather than a hospital admission. This greatly improves quality of life. Staff also report feeling more confident in their role post training, and therefore residents are treated in the right place and at the right time.
Geraldine Rodgers, nurse consultant for frailty and long term conditions, said “Winning this award is an amazing achievement for the Significant 7 team, who have worked really hard to make this tool a reality in practice. To date, the tool has gained a lot of interest and we are currently exploring new ways of how it could be used across the health economy.”
To see the full list of award winners, please visit https://awards.patientsafetycongress.co.uk/patient-safety-awards-winners-2017-1