Is your care home ready for 2021?

2020 is nearly over – bring on 2021! Right? While many of us in the care sector may be feeling this way, unfortunately 2021 is likely to be as challenging as 2020. But putting the infrastructure in place for a successful 2021 isn’t something you can leave until the new year. Optimising outcomes for your residents while ensuring efficient operations and commercial viability doesn’t happen by accident; it needs planning – and that planning needs to start now, if you want to be ready for whatever 2021 throws at the care sector.

If there’s one thing that 2020 has taught us, it’s that none of know what’s around the corner. If ever we needed a life lesson to be prepared for the unexpected, this year has delivered it.

While we can’t have a crystal ball and know exactly how 2021 will unfold, Fulcrum’s care-home consultants and I can apply our cumulative expertise in care home management to anticipate some of the key challenges that are likely to face care-home owners and providers in the next calendar year.

Coronavirus – not the only challenge

It goes without saying that we will continue to live with Covid-19, and the far-reaching implications this has for the care sector is likely to dominate the landscape. Most care-home owners and operators have adapted to this new normal operationally, and the new measures that have been introduced to contain Covid-19 will persist for the foreseeable future.

But the problem with such an overarching challenge – especially when our sector’s response to the pandemic has prompted extensive media coverage – is that it can become your sole focus. Looking only in one direction makes it easy to take your eye off the ball in other areas – areas that arguably are going to need more strategic consideration as a direct consequence of Covid-19.

I know that, as a care-home owner or provider, you are already considering how your care home/s will continue to rise to the challenge of coronavirus, so we’re not going to dwell on that here. Instead, I’m going to urge you to make sure that three other ‘C’s make their way onto your agenda:

• Compliance
• Confidence
• Commercials

Care-home COMPLIANCE: an evolving landscape for 2021

Lockdown and the ongoing need for infection prevention and control has changed the compliance landscape; measures that were introduced in response to the pandemic are being formalised in new methodologies and tools that the CQC will be using. Key amongst these will be the Infection, Prevention and Control tool and the Transitional Regulatory Approach. You can read more detail about this new inspection methodology here.

In addition, Fulcrum’s analysis of CQC care-home ratings data between 2018 and 2020 suggests that the CQC is carrying out more focused inspections – with proportionately more inspections being of homes with the lowest ratings – with the percentage of ‘Outstanding’ and ‘Good’ ratings falling as the proportion of homes who had their ratings downgraded went up. With the care sector likely to remain firmly under media and public scrutiny while coronavirus continues to dominate, we expect the inspectors to continue to provide a harsher yardstick for their ratings.

Taken together, these two developments have significant implications for care-home owners and managers:

• More desk-top inspections
• More focus on the higher-risk services and those at the lower end of ‘requires improvement’
• Harder ratings assessments
• Less frequent visiting of ‘good’ services and those at the higher end of ‘requires improvement’ – meaning potentially long waits for re-inspections if you feel you have made sufficient improvements to merit a better rating.

What this means for your strategic planning: The shifting compliance landscape makes it more important than ever to ensure that you care home is inspection ready, with regular audits of all areas of operations to highlight and address any issues. If you receive an ‘inadequate’ or ‘requires improvement’ rating, you will need to act quickly to create an effective action plan to address the areas of concern to enable you to challenge your rating.

Restoring CONFIDENCE in your care home/s in 2021

Media coverage of care homes during the coronavirus crisis has been a significant factor in damaging consumer confidence in our sector: occupancy rates are down nationally from 90% to 80%, with obvious impacts on commercial viability (see below). Reassuring potential residents who may be nervous about moving into a care facility is going to be a key challenge for all care-home owners and managers in 2021. Equally important will be creating confidence among potential employees that your care home is a safe place to work; without the right staff, your commercial viability will also be undermined.

What this means for your strategic planning: The critical need to restore consumer and potential employee confidence makes it essential to consider tactics that will provide reassurance to these key stakeholders, such as:  

• Publish your infection prevention and control measures: Make these clearly accessible on your website and take advantage of other resources that can provide additional transparency for you, such as Autumna, which provides the opportunity for third-party validation through its Symptom Assessment For Everyone (S.A.F.E.) scheme. 
• Create a video tour of your care home – showing all the great things about your home, but also your infection control measures: Providing a virtual tour is essential for prospective residents and their relatives when they can no longer visit; it helps them not only to see the physicality of where they might be living but also to get a feel for the atmosphere within your care home.
• Request video testimonials from relatives: If you have been able to facilitate Covid-secure meetings between residents and their families, ask the relatives if they are happy about the measures taken and – if so – if they would be willing to provide a video testimonial (on their smart phone) to this effect for you to use on your website and social media.
• Message your Covid-secure measures in your social media: A picture tells a thousand words, so photos of carers and support staff in their PPE are a great way of communicating what you’re doing to keep residents and staff safe.

Planning for COMMERCIAL success in 2021

Restoring confidence among potential residents and employees is an essential first step to ensuring commercial viability in 2021 – but it won’t be enough on its own. The care homes that enjoy the greatest commercial success next year will be those that take an honest look back at their performance in 2020, as well as anticipating sector changes and how they can best meet them, such as the growing number of potential residents with dementia and associated complex behaviours.

What this means for your strategic planning: No two care homes will enter 2021 in exactly the same position, so the plans you need to put in place to optimise the commercials within your care home/s will need to be tailored to where you are now, any particular challenges within your local area and your business goals, but some key actions to consider are:

• Taking stock of where you are now: Objective audits of your care home/s current strengths and weaknesses will enable you to plan to optimise the positives and take remedial action to counter the negatives.
• Assess staff requirements: Have you got the right team to drive commercial success in 2021?  Do they need mentoring or training to enable them to realise your business plans?
• Do you have the right mix between local authority and privately funded residents to support commercial success? If not, what can you do to tip the balance to ensure greater profitability?
• Are you positioned to meet the greatest areas of growing demand? Proportionately more people looking for a place in a care home will be those with dementia and associated complex behaviours, as local authorities and families opt for care in the community for as long as possible. Do you have effective management plans in place to support more complex needs to enable you to attract and support this cohort of potential residents?

We can’t know for sure what 2021 is going to throw at you, your managers, staff and residents. But we do know that the care homes that will thrive in the next year will be those that take proactive, strategic steps now to ensure they have effective plans in place to meet the challenges and capitalise on the opportunities.  Putting Compliance, Confidence and Commercials at the centre of your plans will help you devise an effective route map to steer your care home/s through 2021.

If you’d like to be confident that your care home is equipped to deal with whatever 2021 brings, call me on 020 3411 4014 or email [email protected]