Supporting people to stay in their own care home

It is always great to spend time in the service, visiting interesting work, and this visit was particularly special. On Friday we visited the North Central London digital care homes programme that recently won “health tech partnership of the year” award at the HSJ Partnership Awards.?

Their aim was to better support care homes across North Central London in reviewing the health needs of their residents, using a digital tool to measure their vital signs, as part of NHS England’s Supporting People at Home programme.?

We heard first from Dr Shani Gray, a GP and the clinical lead for this work and Louise Keane, the nurse educator manager whose team has provided all the support and training to care homes. Then from Mumuni Zoure, one of the care home managers, who sang the praises of how this tech helps his residents and the great support he has had from Louise’s team. Breid O’Brien set the context in terms of how this project has been a great example of a collaboration between local, regional and national teams.

Mumuni’s home is also part of a trial with 111 locally where in the event of any untoward results being picked up by the device, these are automatically sent across to the 111 team and a clinician calls back within the hour to discuss the care of the resident. He thought this was a brilliant service.?

Tim Ferris, director of transformation at NHS England joined Sam Sherrington, head of community nursing at NHS England, Chris Streather, regional medical director for London, Alice Ainsworth, deputy director for adult social care and other clinical, digital and improvement colleagues from across north London who were keen to learn more about this work.?

UCL Partners have supported the work over the past two years and hosted the first part of the session and we then got to visit one of two care homes - Lime Tree Gardens and Rathmore House - each using the Whzan Digital Health platform.?

It was great to hear the passion from staff describing what a difference having this information made to the care of their residents, speeding up care when deterioration was spotted and providing reassurance at other times that in fact an emergency trip to hospital wasn’t warranted.?

Joining me in the visit to Rathmore House in Swiss Cottage were Adrian Hayter, GP and national clinical director for older people, Jo Sauvage, GP and chief medical officer designate for North Central London Partners and Kathryn Puno one of the care home nurse educators. We were hosted by home manager Edith Mansfield who clearly runs the home with huge compassion as well as an impressive knowledge of her 20 residents. Edith described how the digital tool helped further personalise the care they are able to provide to their residents, many of whom have quite advanced dementia and may struggle to advise if they are feeling unwell.?

We were then shown the kit in action and had the “speaking function” demonstrated that the care team said residents really like as their results are spoken out loud so they know when they are on track. The results are instantaneously uploaded to the GP system so clinical colleagues can keep an eye on progress. Kathryn showed us how a photograph can be added to the resident’s profile to help track a healing wound or keep an eye on areas under pressure. It was great to meet a number of the residents of the care home and hear their stories.

?Such an uplifting afternoon which ended with a cup of tea and a slice of cake and a sense that when great care meets digital support, truly wonderful things can happen.?

More here on the announcement of the HSJ award win -?

WINNER: Whzan Digital Health and North Central London CCG: Empowering Care Homes with Digital Health Technology?

Over the past two years, starting with support from UCL Partners, Whzan Digital Health has been working in partnership with NHS North Central London CCG as part of the Digital Care Homes programme in North Central London. The aim of the largest project on the programme was to successfully embed Whzan remote monitoring technology into at least 50 per cent of the care homes in NCL, alongside supporting them with their wider digital capability. The project has been recognised as the most successful remote monitoring project in London, with significant system benefits already being seen because of the team’s hard work.

https://www.hsj.co.uk/partnership-awards/hsj-partnership-awards-2022-healthtech-partnership-of-the-year/7032091.article