Older peoples project

As part of one of their priorities to undertake more focused work with older people Healthwatch Tower Hamlets wanted to explore older people’s views on the health and social care services they receive and talk to providers/commissioner to come up with solutions on how support and provisions can be improved for older people across the borough.

For this report, the feedback was collected via 8 ‘Enter and View’ visits to day centres, care homes, hospital wards etc. Supplementary information was collected from other projects and community outreach and signposting.

HW team focussed on the themes listed below:

1) Valuing services: The majority of people that gave feedback seemed to value the services and are grateful for the care they receive, as it gives them the opportunity to be looked after well, feel safe, be able to recover physically or mentally, be active (mentally and physically) and less isolated.

2) Staff: On the whole there was positive feedback on staff (carer workers, carers and nurses) from the majority of people from the services visited. Despite not always getting the support they need e.g. despite taking a long time to respond to bed or room buzzers, most people did not seem to blame individual staff for this shortcoming, but rather insufficient staffing levels and staff being overstretched were the main reasons for this. During the visits most people commented on high staff turnover and lack of continuity in staffing within the services and they feel that this should be improved.

3) Activities: People commented about how important structured activities were and that they should be given the option to do the ones they like more often.

4) Person centred care: This was lacking in most of the services visited as there was more emphasis on group activities.

5) Local services/ activities and signposting: The report shows that is not enough interaction and partnership building work from the side of service providers with local community groups and organisations in their area. Also, it seemed that service providers lack local signposting information such as being unaware of places their clients can be referred to locally for additional support, social activities, support groups, exercise and health related activities, etc.

Below are the recommendations offered by HW

-Commissioners should share good practice from different providers. -Ensuring that care providers have sufficient staffing levels and that they tackle the issue of staff retention. -To look into and tackle the issue of isolation in care homes. - Monitoring of activities provided by care providers and ensuring that care providers actually provide activities that people enjoy. - Providing services/activities that meet the need of the individuals first- ensuring that their care is ‘person centred’. - Ensuring that care provider have better information on local services, signposting information and better networked with local community organisations. -Better co-ordination of activities taking place across the borough and this being linked in with all providers of older people services. - To create a platform/forum for all stakeholders to discuss older people’s issues in the borough.

The HW team also posed specific questions to the Adult Social Care Commissioning Team.