Gathering Feedback about Care Homes in Southampton

Healthwatch Southampton was requested by Southampton City Council  to gather feedback about the city’s care  homes to inform the development of their Care  Home Strategy 2026 for the next 5 years.

Healthwatch collected data by visiting care homes, talking to residents, family members and staff and sharing a digital survey, together with paper and easy read versions. A total of 62 survey responses were received from 10 different care homes across the city. Feedback from residents, family members and staff feedback about care homes was largely positive. The 4 main areas for development were:

• enabling residents to be involved in making choices.
• regular feedback from residents by staff.
• staff diversity training to include refresher and cover topics such as neurodiversity.
• SCC ensuring they listen to their service users, get regular feedback from residents and improve their data collection on referrals.

Recommendations 

• Care  homes to offer taster days for potential residents to visit to help people to choose the right care  home for them.
• Care homes to develop easy read leaflets to support decision making when choosing a care home for people who are unwell or have limited capacity.
• Care  homes to extend current staff diversity and training to include refresher sessions and specialised topic areas e.g. neurodiversity.
• SCC to ensure their staff listen to service users, gather data about referrals for care homes of people who have complex health conditions, and may also have additional needs e.g. mental health, neurodiversity, behavioural issues which may impact other residents, making it difficult to find a suitable placement for them.
• All organisations supporting Care  Home residents to collect equalities monitoring data.