Plugging the gap between health and social care

A system of integrated care for every person in England is a major change that needs to happen. It means care and support built around the needs of the individual, their carers and their family - It is all about improving patient experience and achieving greater efficiency and value from health delivery systems.

Integrated care means:

·         Individuals only tell their story once

·         Professionals communicate with each other

·         A holistic approach to a person’s care

·         Inappropriate admissions to hospitals reduced and lengths of stay cut

·         Individuals do not ‘fall through the gaps’

·         Bringing together primary medical services and community health providers around the needs of individual patients

People are discharged from hospital, and still require medical attention – the communication between health and social care professionals is vital in ensuring patients needs are met. For integrated care to be successful, it means care workers expanding their skill set, to include things traditionally done by health workers (routine medical tasks - changing wound dressings), and health workers developing skills that would have previously been left to care workers (recreational therapies – rehabilitation, care home activities).

The Care Certificate sets out an identified set of standards that health and social care workers adhere to in their daily working life- giving everyone the confidence that workers have the same introductory skills, knowledge and behaviours to provide compassionate, safe and high quality care and support. Whilst this doesn’t encourage care workers to learn medical procedures, it meets somewhere in the middle to give a starting point of plugging the gap between health and social care, enabling both sets of workers to train from the first principles of care.

With the current crisis of the NHS, the shortage of nurses has forced hospitals to hire expensive agency staff – acknowledged by Monitor as the primary cause of the £842million deficit. Hospitals are under extreme pressure to deliver high quality care to patients. Integrating the care system means that admissions to hospitals are reduced and length of stays are cut – allowing social care workers to take on some of the tasks that would otherwise be carried out by nurses, in a hospital.

Figures show that 40% of people in a hospital bed have no medical reason to be there- a person with dementia staying on average 21 days, with a bed day cost of £500. An Alzheimer’s Society survey states that 61% of GPs report that a lack of co-operation between health and social care acts as a barrier to patients getting support.

The current divide between health and social care has a huge impact on the quality of life of service users, with the most vulnerable all too often falling through the gap where health care ends and social care begins. If social care faces more cuts, these vulnerable people will be admitted to hospitals – adding to the capacity problems.

Lord Warner said the health service should become a ‘membership scheme’, charging £10 per month, with people who need to stay in hospital paying extra. If the healthcare system does not change, do you think this is what will happen?

A possible way to stop this becoming the case is to cut training costs across the sector.

E-learning is an effective platform for carrying out the Care Certificate training, especially when a large dispersed workforce is involved. It can be carried out at a time, place and pace to suit the individual so as not to interfere with their day to day activities. With the current financial situation facing the NHS, cost efficiency is of utmost importance, alongside consistent high quality, making e-learning a preferred method of delivery.

Do you think that the Care Certificate could contribute to the health service being more cost effective in the future? Giving both sets of workers a basic understanding of providing quality care both in and out of hospitals, clinics, care homes and the like. 

Are Trainers That Don't Offer E-learning Missing A Trick?

According to CIPD’s annual survey report for Learning and Development 2015 ‘three quarters of organisations use learning technologies – but face-to-face delivery remains dominant.’ The traditional face-to-face approach adds a personal aspect where learners can ask questions and gain insight through storytelling and listening to others, ensuring key learning points are understood by the whole group. But, is this method alone enough to meet all of the needs within an organisation? Is a blend of face-to-face and online learning the answer?

E-Learning

Clients are increasingly choosing e-learning as their preferred method of delivering training, with 29% of CIPD respondents selecting it as their most common form of training. The ability to train a large dispersed workforce is a key factor, as it allows staff in various locations to access the same high quality training course at the same time, whilst saving precious time and money that would be otherwise spent on travel, accommodation and refreshments.

Other reasons for choosing e-learning include:

Ø  Flexibility - access to courses 24/7

Ø  Consistently high quality content

Ø  LMS tracking

Ø  Easy to arrange for high turnover areas such as domiciliary care

Ø  Easy to reach national or international audience

Ø  Large numbers of learners can be trained simultaneously

E-learning can be carried out at a time, place and pace to suit the individual learner

The Learner Management System (LMS) reporting that comes with e-learning is great for both internal and external trainers to monitor and provide reports to client organisations, helping to monitor ROI for training costs. LMS learner tracking provides an audit trail for managers and CQC regarding who has completed the training, allows managers to co-ordinate training, and, monitor in real time, which learner has completed which course/s.

It would be wrong to say that face-to-face training is not effective, it is still the most dominant form of learning, but the cost of implementation is far more than with e-learning. Staff are required to take time out of their day-to-day activities, sometimes travelling across the country to complete a day of training in a classroom which would convert to just 1 hour of e-learning. As a trainer, wouldn’t you want to be able to provide a service to clients in all four corners of the British Isles, at the same time, on the same day?

Of course, there are limitations with e-learning - most notably, the lack of immediate feedback that face-to-face trainers would receive, and the elimination of the group experience of learning in a classroom. However, these are outweighed by the need for flexibility, the cost of training a dispersed workforce and the fact that many individuals prefer to learn at a time, place and pace of their choosing. Our stats at Embrace-learning bear this out consistently - when asked “What did you like most about e-learning?” the overwhelming answer is “I did it at my own pace when it was convenient for me”.

Blended Learning

Blended learning offers a collaborative and holistic approach to learning, delivering the best of both worlds to employees and enhancing the overall learning experience. 40% of CIPD respondents plan to increase the use of blended learning over the next 2 years, making now an ideal time for training companies to increase their product offering to include e-learning courses alongside their face-to-face training.

Offering a range of e-learning courses means that training companies can deliver courses normally considered to be outside of their realm of expertise. For example, as a fire safety trainer, wouldn’t you want to be able to say to your clients – “yes, I can provide you with high quality training in Dementia for your care staff”?

A Health and Safety training company could also offer courses on mental health, safeguarding adults, dementia etc., widening their target audience and providing a service to large clients, with complex training needs.

Here at Embrace-learning, our aim is to further the use of educational technologies in work-related training. We have over 10 years of experience in providing high quality e-learning courses that are up-to-date and relevant to today’s workforce. We believe that through offering e-learning courses alongside face-to-face training, organisations can provide their employees with all of the necessary skills, knowledge and training required to perform to an exceptionally high standard.

Is a blended approach to learning the best way of meeting learning and development needs within an organisation? We think so! What do you think?

To find out more about our e-learning courses and partnership opportunities, visit our website here.

Click here to view the full CIPD Learning and Development Report 2015

Advisory or Mandatory?

When is mandatory training not mandatory?

Apparently when it applies to the social care sector.

There’s something a bit wishy washy about labelling training as mandatory when there is no actual requirement to complete said training. Or worse still, when there is a stated ‘requirement’ to do the training (by the CQC) but there are no real consequences when the training is not completed. Unless you count a slightly lower inspection rating as a real consequence. Is it just me or is it slightly baffling that there is no legal requirement to complete any training in the delivery of social care?

Care providers themselves determine whether a training course is mandatory or not. Some will deem it mandatory while others will consider it optional. While the CQC may require that a service trains their staff to a minimum standard, this is not legally binding. It seems training is a ‘should do?’ rather than a ‘MUST DO!’

The training of care workers in the new Care Certificate is advisory rather than mandatory. The Care Certificate which is promoted as the basic or minimum entry level course is not actually a qualification as we understand the term.  It is not on the National Qualification Framework (NQF) but it is considered a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) course. This is a fantastic introduction to the world of care work and is indeed a minimum requirement for care workers. It is not, alas, mandatory unless deemed mandatory by the care provider.

We have a long way to go before we have a professionalised and regulated social care workforce. There are many reasons why it is important to achieve this. First and foremost is the quality it will bring to the care of the growing number of elderly and vulnerable people in our society. Secondly it will attach a greater value to this incredibly important work and allow carers to follow a career path with pay scales that reflect the importance of this work.  Is it the case that the current status of care work is an accurate reflection of how we as a society value care work? That is, not very highly. We are quick to jump on stories of poor care and express horror and outrage when people are abused and otherwise mistreated but when we scratch the surface a little and look at the way workers are trained and what they are paid, it is clear that the explanations for these behaviours cannot be simply dismissed as the actions of ‘rogue carers’.

Better pay will in turn attract and hold on to the right calibre of person needed by this growing social care sector. The resulting lower turnover of staff will add to the stability of the workforce which, again, will benefit the end users.

A better trained workforce with professional status will help care workers achieve something approaching parity with their health sector counterparts. This in itself will go a small way to greasing the wheels on the journey to an integrated health and social care system. The disparity in training, pay and conditions does nothing to facilitate the team spirit needed when workers are required to work across professional and organisational boundaries in the pursuit of an integrated health and social care system.

There’s an old adage that ‘Ignorance is no defence in law but training is’. I’m sure the day will come when training is, itself, a legal requirement. 

Integrating Health and Social Care

Integration of health and social care has been on the agenda since the turn of the century and has been talked about for a good deal longer. Will we still be talking about it at the turn of the next century or will someone actually be doing something about it?

Is your organisation doing something about it or are you, like the majority, merely paying lip service to what is, admittedly, a noble cause?

The logic is faultless but the application seems to be a good deal more complicated than some would have us believe. We know it’s desirable but is it really possible to bring two systems together to work seamlessly in the delivery of care? It can be difficult enough to get professionals of a similar discipline to work as a team when managing complex health and care packages. When we ask them to work across professional and organisational boundaries we’d better make sure the infrastructure is there to support them. But what is this infrastructure? What does it consist of and who is going to take responsibility for maintaining it? Are the differences in culture so different that we will never truly have an integrated system?

Multidisciplinary teams already exist to manage complex needs. We only need to look at the cases of NHS continuing healthcare to see that it is possible for decisions about health and social care to be made coherently and it is a credit to many of those teams that they can unpick the myriad of needs affecting patients and put together packages of care that meet the needs of the whole person and indeed the needs of those around them. It strikes me however, that it is not so much the decision-making or the ‘design’ but the implementation of those decisions and designs that is the real challenge of integrating health and social care. I wonder whether the fundamental differences in a)culture and b)training for clinicians in healthcare, as opposed to those in social care,  are such that there will never really be a genuinely integrated health and social care system. This sounds defeatist from the outset but I think it highlights just two areas (and there are many more), that need to be addressed if we are going to achieve this holy grail of a truly integrated health and social care system.

It’s worth shining the spotlight on some of the most complex cases requiring input from health and social care services. The provision of NHS continuing healthcare, by definition, applies to people with long term health and social care needs where the dominant need is deemed to be a ‘health care need’ as opposed to a ‘social care need’. So here’s the thing, what is the difference between health and social care? When does one begin and the other end?  As with many other things, it is the boundary, the borderline, the areas that are most difficult to define, where clarity is needed. It is at these professional and organisational boundaries where problems arise and where problems must be resolved in order for integration to occur.

We will consistently be returning to the questions of infrastructure and health versus care culture. It is surely a given that training will be key to any integrated system of health and social care. It is clear that joined up working can only be enhanced by joined up training. It is not entirely clear to me at present which organisations are really taking the lead in this integration of health and social care at a local level. NHS organisations and Local Authorities certainly have responsibility to design such a system but where is the guiding light? Where is the beacon that shows that people are receiving a genuinely joined up, integrated health and social care system? Is such a thing possible?

E-learning vs. face-to-face training, which is best?

Face-to-face training has been a consistent form of training for many years and as it is not dependent on technology it is understandable why some may be attached to this method and be resistant to the thought of changing to something new like e-learning. What is e-learning and how can sitting in front of a computer screen possibly be more beneficial than being able to interact with a trainer in a classroom setting?

Let’s imagine we are sat in the classroom right now with our colleagues, the trainer walks in, greets us and then begins their journey through a multitude of PowerPoint slides. How likely is your mind to wander elsewhere, perhaps onto how many emails you have waiting to be answered or what we might be having for lunch?  There can be many distractions in a classroom and it can be hard for the trainer to know if all learners are really paying attention and how much information is being retained.

How does e-learning technology compare?

E-learning doesn’t prevent interaction; it encourages it and pushes the learner into taking on an active role rather than passive.  Yes the learner must have the motivation to sit down and go through all of the material, but there is no way of missing out information or becoming distracted. The interactive quizzes and functionality of the e-learning material ensures that learners work through each step, gaining underpinning knowledge and completing competency assessments along the way.

The obvious advantage of using e-learning to train your staff is that it allows them to learn at a time, pace and place which suits you and the learner.  This method of training is ideal for a large dispensed workforce: learners can work through the material in an environment which is best for them, they simply need internet access.  E-learning can be tailored to meet individual requirements and the variety of digital technologies incorporated into the course material (text, imagery, animation, audio, video) allow for different learning styles. The course material is continuously updated with changes to legislation and learners can revisit units if necessary. The Learner Management System provides management information and allows for an audit trail and evidence for CQC requirements.

Overhead costs can be reduced by eliminating the need for travel, accommodation and food expenses as well as external trainer costs, room hire and having to take staff out of their day to day roles and cover shifts. Remove all of these costs and you are only left with the initial cost of implementing the e-learning course. E-learning is the clear winner in terms of cost.

Blended learning is the best possible training method and can enhance the overall learning process, offering a collaborative and holistic approach to learning.  I am by no means claiming that face-to-face training is ineffective but with the advances in technology in the past decade, it is unquestionable not to incorporate e-learning into your training and development programme.

The evidence is there - over 10 years of our learner feedback shows that 85% of learners prefer e-learning over face to face training.

Lack of knowledge is not accepted as a legal stand. Completed training is. Certificates can be printed off after completing the e-learning training and used as evidence of best practice.

If you had the option to reduce all of your training costs yet keep the quality of your staff training at a consistently high standard, would this be of interest to you?

Interest Free Monthly Packages

Embrace our monthly package deals! As one of the UK's leading suppliers of elearning courses to the health & social care sector we are proud to introduce our new course catalogue & pay monthly interest free package deals. You can be assured of the highest standard of training with our CQC compliant, certificated courses. Our deals include Mandatory, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum or Alternative Packages giving you the freedom to choose the courses you require whether it’s refresher training for existing staff or training your new employees. Click here to view courses. We offer courses to meet all your mandatory and statutory training requirements, professional standards and to support best practice in the workplace. Elearning can be integrated into your current training matrix offering flexibility and reduced overhead costs.

Our course range includes: Care Certificate Caring for People with Dementia Epilepsy Awareness Health & Safety & COSHH Mental Capacity Act 2005 Safe Handling of Medicines  With our flexible and cost-effective pay monthly subscription you can pay as little as £1.80 per learner per course. To find out more call 0161 928 9987  or visit our website www.embrace-learning.co.uk

Mental Health Awareness Week

Mental Health Awareness Week 2015

Did you know that it is Mental Health Awareness Week? The theme for the week is Mindfulness - this is about learning how to pay attention to the present moment without getting stuck in the past or worrying about the future! 

We have a wide range of e-learning courses relating to mental health and disability awareness including:

 

Mental Capacity Act 2005
Caring for People with Dementia
Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards
Learning Disability Induction

Acquired Brain Injury Awareness

Supporting People with Learning Disabilities and Mental Health Needs
 

Click here for a free trial of our Mental Capacity Act 2005 course.

 

More information about Mental Health Awareness Week at www.mentalhealth.org.uk

Follow us on twitter @embracelearnuk for updates & join in with the discussion using #MHAW15