Social care is a special thing, and it requires a special person. We all know that it takes a certain something to work in care. The purpose and pride that comes from supporting your community drives so many people in our wonderful sector. For our UK Care Week Voice of the People blog we wanted to know what it was that drew people to work in social care, so we asked them!  

S. Ferron, Birmingham Community Healthcare Trust  
“I’m very passionate to be able to deliver high quality care to palliative and end of life patients at the most important time of their lives.”   

Katie Thorn, Digital Care Hub  
“I work in social care because I basically grew up in it. My grandparents had a nursing home, which my mum then ran. I have many, many happy memories as a kid of running around, just spending lots of time with our residents there. I’ve worked as the carer, worked in operations, worked from the kitchen, and I just love this industry. I think it’s so amazing to get to support people, to really get know them, to find out all of the amazing things they’ve done throughout their lives, and I’m really excited to continue working in social care.”  

Linda Knock, Harmonized Care Limited   
“I’ve worked for Harmonized Care for not quite five years, but I have worked in health and social care for 37 years and I do it because I want to be able to make a positive difference to people and I want to be able to help them to stay in the place that they want to be in, which is their own home usually.”  

Adam Purnell, The Caring View  
“For me it was around the understanding that each of us is going to get old and each of us are going struggle with things that we need in the future and I want to have good care when I’m older so I wanted to join to provide that support for people now but also to inspire future generations so that as a country we can come together and provide the support for the needs that people have.” 

Mathew Onwochei, Dignified Services Limited  
“First of all, because i needed a job, but when I came into the care industry, I found out that I’m giving my best because I’m a passionate about the work. I love people, I’m passionate, I’m compassionate about people. So I give my best because I want to. And I find that I’m doing it and I love it. Now I’ve been there for one year, and I’ve got an opportunity to get a better paying job. I said no because I love what I’m doing. I’m there to put smiles on their faces.”  

Joshua Richardson, Care Workers’ Charity  
“I’m working in care because my auntie is a care worker. I can see how much she cares, see the work she does and how hard she works and how much help that care workers need. Working for the Care Workers’ Charity is a brilliant way of giving back and giving as much help to care workers as possible.”  

Emma Kildare, Birkdale Park Nursing Home  
“The reason I ended up in social care was because I worked in the NHS as a hospital matron for a very, very long time and it became exhausting. I started to go to Burkdale Park Nursing home working on nights just to try and step back from the mainstream but then after a couple of years went on to days and now I’m back being a matron. It’s a completely different environment being within the nursing home sector than it is in the NHS.  

What I enjoy the most is I’ve got an amazing team behind me, the manager is really good, we’ve got a very good relationship, the team are great behind me and I’ve got lots of autonomy to do what I want, to create my own team, I’m allowed to invent new things, implement new changes and we are in the middle of doing an improvement program to try and add loads of bits in that will enhance the home, enhance the resident’s care and we’re also developing all of our staff quite a lot as well.”  

Vicky Lewin, I Care MK  
“I needed to get experience with vulnerable adults which is why I joined care, but I enjoyed it so much that I never left.”

We all come from different walks of life, on different journeys to different destinations. Yet, as we spoke to people for our UK Care Week Voice of the People blog we found the common denominator of compassion and commitment from everyone we spoke to. It takes something special inside you to work in care, and there is something special in care that connects that part of us all together.

You can read more about our time at UK Care Week 2024 here.

People drive social care. The people who provide care, those who utilise care, our families and our wider communities. When you want to know about the reality of social care you need to speak to these people directly. So that’s what we did! Starting off at the Care England Conference.

Care England are a force for empowerment and growth in the social care sector. Their recent conference ‘Championing Change’ reflected this focus. The day was filled with engaging discussions and shared insights as a who’s who of positive change in social care shared their stories and perspectives. There remains a lot of work to do in social care to achieve the future we want. But there was also plenty to be proud of on the day, and several attendees took some time to share their experiences with us. 

Sarah Jennings, Majesticare 
“The people that we look after make me happy. Making them happy makes me happy.” 
 
Prof Martin Green, Care England 
“I think it’s the impact we have on the people we support and I see lots of people who tell me that their lives have been transformed. 

For example, I was with somebody the other day and she told me that she’d been living in her own home, she was really frightened, her husband had died, and then she came into a care home and she said it was a new lease of life.” 
 
Raina Summerson, Agincare 
“My happiest moments in social care are when we’re taking over the transfer of services that have not been invested in or at risk of closure and you go in and you breathe that new life into someone’s home or someone’s service delivery. You work with them and you work with the workforce, you turn it around and you just have that positive buzz of making a difference in people’s lives.” 
 
Vic Fitzwalter, Jewish Care 
To increase staff involvement, we introduced a board in the office when a member of staff does something exceptional. They come in, use a different colour pen and write on the board. 
Then we speak about it and give them a clap. The board is full of exceptional stuff. It helps staff morale.  
 
A lot of times the care team, they’re doing a great job, but they’re not recognised, so this is awesome. 
 
Emmanuel Ali, Care Managers Ltd  
The technology that we brought into play has really helped us, technologies like Alexa were quite useful because [the people utilising our service] don’t need to wait for anyone of us to do anything for them. They can just talk and get what they like, [such as] people who like music, they just play it without waiting for anyone to come around to help them. It’s about enablement, you know, which they are very happy with. 
 
Tony Seagroatt, HR Fit for Purpose 
I think of my mum’s experience with social care. To me, what was good about the care home was that, from the manager down, the communication was good with all the staff. Mum’s personal needs were taken care of brilliantly. She also had things that were important to her, like having her hair done. That was done every week. They involved her in all the activities. She was a very social person, she loved being with all the other people in the home. They were very welcoming when we went too. Whenever we wanted to go and visit her in the home. I think it was just a very positive experience for her.” 

Anita Goyal, Goyal Foundation 
My passion and interest is really encouraging young people from schools and colleges to come in and learn about social care so that they can plan and design their career pathway. There’s a great space for careers in social care. And we have our second annual National Care Careers Conference. Which will be held on the 19th of November at the amazing Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Where we’re just going to give young people an insight and education around the social care sector. It’s a really positive experience. We’re going to have some amazing exhibitors and workshops that will teach and educate young people about various things like dementia. 
 
I think that there’s much work to be done around that. Especially with educating young people so that they can grow up as being the citizens of the future. Where they can support help and understand how they can contribute to this area of work. Especially with research, with discoveries, also supporting on social care side as well. 
 
Jodie Allen Cawley, Lifeways Care 
We have an initiative called Quality Checkers, and we have a hundred Quality Checkers in the organisation. They are people with lived at experience, who we support, who tell us about their experiences of the kind of support we provide, and what good looks like. 
We have some quality checkers that go on tour and give us this whole raft of feedback [across our services]. We have 11,000 staff who support almost 5000 people. So we harness all that feedback and then we come together once a year in our national workshop and we work through it all together.  
 
What people have told us is working about the support we provide and what isn’t working about support provide. Then we co -produce solutions around how we can improve what’s not working and we would celebrate the stuff that is working and we’re doing that in a really interactive way. 

There is so much to celebrate, so much to enjoy, and so much to champion in social care. It is our pleasure to work with so many amazing people, and our privilege to be a part of a community committed to driving positive change.

The government set digital deadline requires at least 80% of care services to be using a digital care planning system by March 2024. But what benefits can using a digital care planning platform truly bring to your care service?

With a digital care planning platform, your paper-based care plans will be transformed. Care notes can be completed on the go allowing for more detailed and accurate records. On the go recording means information doesn’t get missed or forgotten and care teams don’t have to spend hours writing down their notes when they get a chance. The notes recorded digitally or via the speech to text function will be easier to read for all the care team, saving time on figuring out a member of staff’s handwriting.

With more accurate notes, comes more accurate care. Where care teams are able to record notes immediately after providing care, the care they delivered and any changes no matter how small in a person are fresh in their mind. This information will be recorded, and senior carers are able to pick it up and act upon it, ensuring the people you support are receiving the most appropriate care suitable for them. Gaps in records can be quickly identified and highlighted and notes are accessed quickly and easily within the online platform. Trends with regards to MUST, Weight loss, Food and Fluid management are more easily identifiable and acted upon.

As care notes can be logged on the go, your care teams will have more time to dedicate to delivering person-centred care. With all the necessary information about the people you support on the devices from care plans, care notes, handover notes, daily tasks, alerts and more, your care teams will have all the information they need, literally in the palms of their hands. Time will no longer be wasted looking for a file and reading through all the handwritten notes.

By adopting Nourish’s digital care planning platform, carers in Leicestershire County Care Ltd (LCCL) home Harvey House, save an average of an hour a week while care team leaders save at least two hours per week. In another LCCL home Whittingham House the team saves approximately 20 minutes per carer per week. With 10 carers on the floor, this works out at 200 minutes per week – just over 3 hours of time saved that can be reallocated back to the people they support.

This saving means that carers have more time to deliver quality person-centred care and time for activities and outings that are essential to the wellbeing of residents, all resulting in improving the health of the people they support.

Becoming ecologically friendly is a goal many care services and businesses across all sectors have set for themselves. The UK government has pledged to be net zero by 2050 while the NHS is working towards being net zero by 2040 with 80% of the reductions happening by 2028.

Using a digital care planning platform will help to reduce the amount of paper you use in your care service. 65% of care services using Nourish reported that they saved up 100 sheets of paper every single week just by using Nourish. Similarly, 95% of our care service managers reported that they save up £2,000 on stationery alone every year by using Nourish. We encourage more remote demonstrations and training of our platform to reduce our carbon footprint and either allow you to purchase your own devices or can provide sustainable devices so your care service can take the steps towards being greener.

Using Nourish gives you, your home managers and senior management team a bird’s eye view of every home in your remit. From head office, directors can observe trends across the whole group, while home managers are able to identify trends within residents in their home as well as trends with staff interactions, building team morale and delivering praise or training where required.

When LCCL were using paper before they went digital, if the senior management team wanted to see the care delivered and the health of the residents supported by LCCL, they would have to go each location and read the handwritten notes. An extremely time-consuming task where it is also hard to spot trends.

The ability to see an overview of every service within your care group gives a more consistent approach to care. You are able to see all the alerts and warnings that have been raised in each care service allowing you to analyse how long warnings have been open and the types of warnings being raised. This will help you identify any problems and put improvement measures in place. This ensures that all your services are working to the standards set by you and you are able to see where one service may need extra support and which home would be best to take direction from.

“At Harvey House, I can oversee all residents and staff on a daily basis to ensure all needed interactions have been met. Reports make gathering information such as incidents/accidents, ABC charts easier to manage and audit in a weekly basis, paperwork cannot get lost as everything is all in one place. I can complete these audits at home or at work.” – Lisa Pegg, Harvey House Manager, LCCL

Fully utilising the features and tools that come with a digital care planning platform can have a positive effect on your CQC ratings. Nourish is streamlined in a way that allows care teams to deliver person-centred care to all residents. Because the system is intuitive and easy to use, teams are able to spend more meaningful time with the people they support due to the time saved.

The ability to give evidence to various stakeholders quickly and efficiently is also one great benefit of using Nourish. With reports pulled instantly at the click of a button, the key information is available in an easy to read dashboard. Care services are able to give temporary secure access to the Nourish system to CQC inspectors and Local Authority Compliance inspectors if they wish to view specific care plans. In the current climate of where remote inspections are taking place more frequently, this will save an immense amount of time.

“Using Nourish has definitely had a positive impact on our CQC ratings, particularly due to the record keeping features meaning detailed care notes are recorded in the moment.” – Stuart Vive-Kananda, Leicestershire County Care LTD, Owner

Christmas 2022 is fast approaching and appears to be the first Christmas since 2019/20 without national lockdown restrictions affecting the way we celebrate Christmas, hooray! So, with a somewhat normal Christmas ahead, what activities can we host that are fun and festive for everyone regardless of age and ability! 

Christmas is a great time for creating festive crafts. There are many simple and meaningful crafts you can make with the people you support to get in the festive spirit.  

Wreaths – create a Christmas wreath with the people you support to hang on the doors of the people you support’s rooms. There are many options depending on capabilities and your risk assessments from coloured wreath to fresh wire wreaths.  

Card making – decorate Christmas cards with the people you support to send to their families or for a card swap within your service. The cards can be as simple as a Christmas photo taken of each person with a message on the back. 

Centrepieces – if you’re planning on having a Christmas meal with the people you support, decorate centrepieces for the tables. These can be as intricate as decorated logs or snowy mason jars with LED candles in.  

Food is a huge and important aspect of Christmas for many people and activities centred around fluid and nutrition can be beneficial to those living in care. 

Treat tasting – try all the Christmas goodies from mince pies to fruit cake, to sherry and eggnog. Did anyone have a sweet table just for the Christmas period and if so, what sweets did they have? 

Cheese & wine (or wine alternative) evening – throw a special event for the people you support with cheese and wine (or a non-alcoholic alternative) and, if appropriate, invite their families to join the festivities. You could even hold a raffle and ask local businesses to donate prizes.  

Baked goods decorating – there are many different baked goods available at Christmas time at varying levels of difficulty. Gingerbread houses are more difficult than they look while covering cookies and cakes with icing and sugared decorations are a little easier.  

Reminiscence – Using reminiscence packs or information from the internet, discuss the Christmas traditions the people you support engaged in with their families. Are there any you could implement into your care service? 

Movie showing & snacks – make Christmas Eve special with a showing of a Christmas film with hot chocolate and snacks. 

Choir singing – spread the Christmas cheer by having a sing along. Instead of printing out songbooks, why not utilise YouTube and put the lyrics on a tv screen for everyone to see.   

Check out our December activity planner for more ideas on what to do throughout the festive period. We’d love to see any photos of the activities you participate in, please send them to caring@nourishcare.co.uk or tag @NourishCare on social media. 

Thank you to Future Care Group, who published the following blog on their website after rolling out Nourish in their 18 nursing homes. We love hearing how Nourish is helping and improving care services across the country!

Thank you to Warrington Community Living for sharing the following article on their website. We love hearing how Nourish‘s digital platform  is helping and improving care services across the country!

Thank you to Avante Care & Support for sharing the following article on their website. We love hearing how Nourish is helping and improving care services across the country!

Bridge Haven care home has introduced Nourish, an app-based care management platform that will enable Avante Care & Support to remove paper care plans entirely.

Other benefits include creating consistent reporting across the home, less data input duplication, and quicker access to historical resident data.

Bridge Haven is a popular care home located in the heart of the picturesque village of Bridge; it’s a vibrant care home community with a warm and welcoming atmosphere. Residents enjoy activities, go on outings, and have plenty of opportunities to socialise with other residents and staff.

At the heart of Bridge Haven’s care delivery ethos is the Eden Alternative approach. By following this framework, staff can ensure the overall well-being and excellent care delivery for all residents. Staff encourage social interaction and work towards eradicating loneliness and boredom.

Anita Easton, Acting Home Manager, said, ‘We are delighted to be working with Nourish electronic care planning system. We can now input information at the point of contact, allowing for a more in-depth and person-centred assessment of our residents’ personal and practical care needs and, most importantly, more quality time to spend with the residents.’

Bridge Haven care home has a wealth of specialised resources to support individuals living with dementia. The introduction of Nourish will allow more community engagement and support more daily activities for our residents, ensuring that every resident has a vibrant and fulfilling life.

Thank you to Peverel Court Care for sharing the following article on their website. We love hearing how Nourish integrations such as GP Connect are benefitting our clients. 

For Peverel Court Care, any opportunity to help advance the alignment between health and social care is one not to be missed. So when our digital care management software provider Nourish approached us asking if we would beta test their new GP Connect integration, we were delighted to help.

Merryfield House, our nursing care home in Witney, Oxfordshire, was selected as the ideal place to beta test the new solution. By undertaking the pilot programme, Merryfield became the first care home in the country to access GP Connect via the Nourish platform.

Following a successful trial at Bartlett’s, we had rolled out Nourish to our homes as our chosen digital care plan solution in late 2020. More information about Nourish and the benefits we’ve seen can be found in our article on the digital care plan roll out.

GP Connect is a service that allows GP practices and authorised clinical staff to share and view GP practice clinical information and data between IT systems, quickly and efficiently. The service makes patient medical information available to clinicians when and where they need it leading to improvements in the care they’re able to provide.

“The introduction of GP Connect is a huge step towards delivering interoperability and establishing a connected care environment within health and social care. Nourish customers will be able to review relevant and timely medical notes for people they support, leading to better continuity of care, and resulting in safer, improved outcomes. I look forward to seeing the positive impact this delivers for care teams and those they support.”

Nuno Almeida, Founder and CEO of Nourish Care

With the support of our digital partner Nourish, we now have access to the GP records and medical notes for our residents, facilitating more informed decision making. We will have access to clinical history, medications, allergies, history of immunisations and more. This valuable information will enhance the work we do and surface the right information at the right time.

As the first to test this extension within Nourish, we will be shaping the way care environments interact with GP services and taking a significant step towards a joined-up care environment. We look forward to seeing how our care teams engage with GP Connect and the impact it will have on care practice.

As a business, we are always looking for ways to put our residents first, to provide them with the best possible service, and to make a positive contribution to the community. We believe that beta testing the GP Connect extension in Nourish aligns with all of those values.

“By using GP Connect we now have a better understanding of our resident’s needs. Accessing the GP record helps us to understand the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ around an individual’s needs. If there are concerns regarding medication, we can review the record and make more informed decisions. GP Connect is particularly helpful when admitting a new resident, by having this information at hand we can provide the best possible care from the start. Before GP Connect we would wait for an email or phone call from the GP. Now we can access the relevant information instantly, which is great!”

Kefas Jeshua, Peverel Court

“By switching on the GP Connect extension in Nourish we have key clinical information at our fingertips, helping us to minimise adverse events, providing better support. This information really helps!”

Francisca Torres, Peverel Court

It’s not just our team that are seeing the benefits of the pilot GP Connect programme:

“Peverel Court was the first to participate in Beta testing for the GP Connect extension. Preet, Kefas and the team were very engaged with the trial and were extremely committed and helpful. A driver for enabling GP Connect was to support new residents coming to the home, to access all their key information beforehand so the team could make the resident feel as comfortable as possible. It was great to see Peverel Court testing the latest system and striving for continuous improvement within their service.”

Elise Featley – Product Marketing Manager at Nourish Care

Thank you to Avante Care & Support for sharing the following article on their website. We love hearing how Nourish is helping and improving care services across the country!

Pilgrims View residential care home has introduced Nourish, an app-based care management platform that will enable Avante Care & Support to remove paper care plans entirely.

Electronic care planning brings many benefits, including working more efficiently when recording residents’ information and freeing up more time to focus on our residents. Other benefits include creating consistent reporting across the home, less data input duplication, and quicker access to historical resident data. Pilgrims View is a vibrant care home community with a warm and welcoming atmosphere. Residents enjoy activities, go on outings, and have plenty of opportunities to socialise with other residents and staff.

At the heart of Pilgrims View’s care delivery ethos is the Eden Alternative approach. In following this framework, we can ensure the overall well-being and excellent care delivery for all our residents. Staff encourage social interaction and work towards eradicating loneliness and boredom. We believe this sets Avante apart from other more process-led care providers.

Jennifer Rafemoyo, Home Manager, said, ‘We have all been so excited for this day to come and the transfer over to the Nourish electronic care planning system. We can now input information at the point of contact, allowing for a more in-depth and “person-centred” assessment of our residents’ personal and practical care needs. In addition, Nourish uses cutting-edge technology and allows us to identify patterns of behaviour and well-being indicators that have otherwise not been identified. We are very much looking forward to working with Nourish and spending more time with our residents’. 

Pilgrims View care home has a wealth of specialised resources to support individuals living with dementia. The introduction of Nourish will allow more community engagement and support more daily activities for our residents, ensuring that every resident has a vibrant and fulfilling life.

Ensuring we stay properly hydrated and eat a balanced diet every day is an essential but sometimes an arduous task. Adults are recommended to drink approximately 1500ml of liquid every single day and eat a minimum of 5 fruits and vegetables as well as food from every food group. How you can ensure these needs are met are explained below. 

A shrinking appetite is another side effect of natural ageing and difficulties with tastes and textures are common for those with learning disabilities. But there are many ways to encourage and improve food intake through activities and switching up the way food is presented. Maintaining a healthy weight is essential for keeping a healthy immune system, decreasing the risk of being deficient in nutrients and the chance of broken bones in an accident. For some, maintaining a healthy weight may be a struggle so, with the appropriate advice, fortifying food with cream, milk powder or butter may help. For others, a modified diet is essential to prevent episodes of choking. All food and drink can follow the seven levels of the IDDSI scale. When food is modified to fit the IDDSI scale, it loses its form and looks less appetising. As we typically eat with our eyes, using piping bags or food moulds will help make modified food look more appealing and therefore will help anyone on a modified diet to maintain a healthy weight.  

Adding food-based activities to your activity programme will not only increase food intake but also will fall under the category of activities of daily living. These are activities the average adult would do in their own home, such as folding clothes, cooking, and cleaning. Including such activities promotes independence and has a positive impact on mental health, wellbeing, confidence, and self-esteem. There are a lot of different ways to incorporate food into your activities programme. Decorate pizzas with a variety of toppings, peel, or chop vegetables, start a vegetable patch or have themed menus with adjoining activities for the people you support to look forward to.  

Promoting good hydration has many benefits from boosting brain function, maintaining urinary and kidney health to healthy digestion. Not feeling thirsty is a natural part of ageing and can also be a symptom or a side effect of other health issues. Dehydration, in care homes for the elderly particularly, is linked to increased falls, delirium, increased urinary tract infections and excessive use of antibiotics. Encouraging fluids isn’t always easy but there are some creative ways to increase the fluid intake of the people you support. Serving ice lollies, jelly or soup will all encourage fluid intake. 

Incorporating fluids to your activities programme is an effortless way to encourage extra hydration. Making smoothies or mocktails are great activities as you can include the people you support in the creation of the final product as well as increasing fluid intake. Hosting a coffee morning or going out for tea and cake to a local café or garden centre is another enjoyable way to encourage fluid intake. 

Our activity planner for 2022 so far includes a few ideas for nutrition and hydration activities, take a look. 

The Nourish platform enables you to set fluid goals, monitor food and fluid intake and set alert warnings for anyone you support who has not met their goal for that day. This enables care teams to ensure that the people you support are eating and drinking enough and if they are not, this can be investigated and corrected. Within the Nourish care system, carers can record MUST scores using the BAPEN scale in just three clicks of a button, all previous or historical numerical data is pulled through from previous scores, migrating the information to eliminate the need for manual calculation and reduce the risk of human error. These can be scheduled at regular intervals so that care teams are alerted when MUST assessments are due. Reports can also be generated quickly and easily that compare previous records. 

By recording this kind of data and using Nourish’s insights and reports functions, trends will be spotted earlier. Fish & Chip Friday is a common menu theme across care homes and if someone you support periodically leaves their meal untouched on a Friday, it may be the case they do not like this meal. Recording this data in Nourish enables this information to be shared across care teams and departments quickly and easily.  

Some of the people you support may have different nutritional needs such as an allergy or a different level of food and drink. This is logged in each resident’s care plan under the eating and drinking section and then contextually summarised for the carers providing fluid or food interactions to view their preferences, likes/dislikes, and dietary requirements. This can either be shown as a checklist for carers to adhere to or a guide, ensuring every carer and every staff member, including agency, are aware of preference or requirement.  

With fluid intake, meal preferences and consumption, and MUST scores all recorded and stored in one place and instantly available, updating nutrition and hydration care plans has never been easier or more effective.