Nutrition and Hydration Week 2016

In 2015, 32 Nations pledged their support to Nutrition and Hydration Week, and the website http://nutritionandhydrationweek.co.uk/ had over 9000 visits from 49 countries.

This year, the awareness week takes place from the 14th-20th March. The mission is to “create a global movement that will reinforce and focus energy, activity and engagement on nutrition and hydration as an important part of quality care, experience and safety improvement in health and social care settings.”

The following 10 key characteristics of ‘good nutrition and hydration care’, taken from the Nutrition and Hydration Week website, are a requirement to meet the Hospital Food Standards SC19, set out in the NHS Contract for hospitals:

1. Screen all patients and service-users to identify malnourishment or risk of malnourishment and ensure actions are progressed and monitored.
2. Together with each patient or service user, create a personal care/support plan enabling them to have choice and control over their own nutritional care and fluid needs.
3. Care providers should include specific guidance on food and beverage services and other nutritional & hydration care in their service delivery and accountability arrangements.
4. People using care services are involved in the planning and monitoring arrangements for food service and drinks provision.
5. Food and drinks should be provided alone or with assistance in an environment conducive to patients being able to consume their food (Protected Mealtimes).
6. All health care professionals and volunteers receive regular raining to ensure they have the skills, qualifications and competencies needed to meet the nutritional and fluid requirements of people using their services.
7. Facilities and services providing nutrition and hydration are designed to be flexible and centred on the needs of the people using them, 24 hours a day, every day.
8. All care providers are to have a nutrition and hydration policy centred on the needs of users, and is performance managed in line with local governance, national standards and regulatory frameworks.
9. Food, drinks and other nutritional care are delivered safely.
10. Care providers should take a multi-disciplinary approach to nutrition and hydrational care, valuing the contribution of all staff, people using the service, carers and volunteers working in partnership.

 Watch this video from the Nutrition and Hydration Week organisers to find out more information on each of these 10 points.

Good nutrition and hydration can help people to recover more quickly from an illness.
This week is a platform to raise awareness and make sure carers know the importance of a patient’s nutrition and hydration- to improve or maintain their wellbeing.

At Embrace-learning, we provide quality e-learning resources to the health and social care sector. Our online training course, “Nutrition, Diet and Health”, will benefit learners with little or no previous knowledge, enabling them to gain an understanding of the importance of providing meals that fulfil the nutritional requirements of the human body. The course covers topics like:

• The Eatwell Plate
• 5-a-day Campaign
• Nutrition during pregnancy, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age
• Nutrition for Vegetarians, Vegans and Ethnic Minority Groups

View our catalogue of 50+ e-learning courses and purchase your online nutrition course at www.embrace-learning.com.  ​

The benefits of e-learning

Get The Care Certificate e-Learning Course- Free

For a limited time only, get unlimited use of
The Care Certificate e-learning course COMPLETELY FREE when you purchase a pay monthly package deal from Embrace-learning.

The Care Certificate, as described by Skills for Care, is an identified set of standards that health and social care workers adhere to in their daily working life. It gives everyone the confidence that workers have the same introductory skills, knowledge and behaviours to provide compassionate, safe and high quality care and support.

As well as being used for staff who are new to the care industry, the Care Certificate can be completed by existing staff to refresh or improve their knowledge.

 To take advantage of huge cost savings, just select the course titles and tell us the number of learners, and we will discuss the best package with you. You also get our Learner Management System free of charge with any package, helping you to track and monitor learner progress, and run management reports.

Unlimited use of the Care Certificate means that over the 12 month period you could buy 50 other course titles and still use the Care Certificate 250 times, so everybody who needs the Care Certificate has the opportunity to complete it, free of charge.

Click here to view our catalogue of 50+ courses.

You can be assured of the highest standard of training with our CQC compliant, certificated courses.

 E-learning can be integrated in to your current training matrix offering flexibility, improving quality and ultimately reducing your overall training costs.

 View more information on our package deals here.

Contact Embrace-learning 0161 928 9987

GPs should urge patients to go online: e-learning alternative to standard medical prescriptions

BBC News recently published an article: GPs should urge patients to go online. The recommendations made by Baroness Martha Lane Fox include every NHS building having access to free wi-fi. The aim is for GPs to actively encourage patients to go online for booking appointments and ordering repeat prescriptions, enabling the NHS to push forward with an IT revolution.

Tim Kelsey, NHS England national director for patients and information, said: "Digital health tools can dramatically improve people's lives and well-being.”

E-learning is increasingly being used as an alternative to standard medical prescriptions.
There is a wealth of evidence to show that early intervention is both effective and highly cost efficient.

GPs can now prescribe e-learning courses to patients and carers giving the learner the opportunity to access training anywhere they have an internet connection. This flexibility to gain self-help can provide early intervention for many common ailments and is an effective way of enhancing the health and well-being, and resilience of patients and carers. 

Baroness Lane Fox said "One of the founding principles of the NHS was to ensure that everyone - irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation - should have equal opportunity to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available." In rural areas, there is limited access to the internet, but if NHS buildings were to implement the free wi-fi for all, patients could still benefit from e-learning within the buildings. If required, courses can also be downloaded so they can be accessed without an internet connection.

Our course range at Embrace-learning includes:

• About Me: Building Resilience for Caring
• Awareness of Alcohol and Substance Misuse
• Obesity and Nutrition
• Supporting People with Autism
• Supporting People with Cerebral Palsy
• Supporting People with Diabetes Mellitus

Find out more at our website: www.embrace-learning.com

Social Housing Rent Cuts will Endanger the Vulnerable

Social Housing Rent Cuts will Endanger the Vulnerable.

How will an annual 1% reduction affect Housing Associations? On the surface it does not seem like such a big deal, but many Housing Associations are concerned that the cut will affect the quality of service they can provide to their residents.

The decline in income from the rent cut will mean that councils/housing associations do not have the resources to maintain the current homes standard. A backlog of work will build up, leading to deterioration in the quality of housing stock and tenants’ living conditions. Work that is delayed due to insufficient resources will increase the cost of doing it later’. Martin Wicks. Secretary, Swindon tenants campaign group.

The Housing Revenue Account in Swindon- made up of tenants’ rent and service charges- will lose more than £9m, resulting in a capital budget cut of around £2m per year- nearly 12%.

So with this in mind, Housing Associations need to save on costs, without affecting the quality of service that they provide to tenants.

The Guardian Housing Network recently published a post: 4 ways Housing associations can engage with their tenants:

•        Go to people, don’t expect them to come to you
•        Do more than talk: listen, promise and deliver
•        Seize the moment
•        Sweat the small stuff- never dismiss any feedback as trivial

For housing associations to successfully engage in these ways, just like in other sectors, staff need to be fully trained on how to communicate effectively, particularly with vulnerable or challenging tenants.

Face-to-face training, whilst valuable, after taking in to consideration all additional costs of room hire, logistics and staff cover, can be extremely expensive.

An effective alternative is e-learning. Companies who have implemented e-learning have reported up to 35% saving on cost and 50% saving on time. Completing an online course typically takes between 25% and 60% of the hours needed for traditional classroom based training. This, coupled with the flexibility of completing a course at any time, place or pace, is a sure sign that e-learning should be the chosen form of training for Housing Associations.

Example courses for Housing Association staff include:

·         Safeguarding Adults / Children

·         The Mental Capacity Act

·         The Care Certificate

·         Disability Awareness Courses

·         Fire Safety

·         Health and Safety

At Embrace-learning, we provide the highest quality, online training courses.  Click on any of the course titles above to view more information on our website, and to see what other courses we have on offer.

Although the 1% decrease will affect the quality of service, I feel that if Housing Associations were to switch their training offering to e-learning, and save up to 30% in the process, the money saved would then contribute somewhat towards continued high quality support for tenants, making the annual 1% reduction in rents less of a hit.

What else do you think Housing Associations should do to save money and ensure they still provide the best service possible to tenants?

If you would like any more information on any of our 50+ course titles, call us on 0161 928 9987

Or visit www.embrace-learning.com

Training providers are making false claims regarding the Care Certificate

Following a news publication by Skills for Care on November 3^rd, it has come to our attention that a number of training providers are making false claims in relation to the Care Certificate.

These claims include:

·         That they have been ‘licensed’ to award the Care Certificate

·         That they have been ‘accredited’ to provide training related to the Care Certificate

·         That the Care Certificate can be achieved by completing the providers e-learning or workbooks

As stated in the Skills for Care article:

1.       No provider has been ‘licensed’ – this does not exist.

2.       No providers are accredited to deliver the Care Certificate, but some organisations may have had their training externally quality assured by a third party.

3.       It is not possible to achieve the Care Certificate through completion of e-learning or workbooks alone.

4.       The Care Certificate is not a mandatory requirement. However, the Care Quality Commission will expect that appropriate staff who are new to services which they regulate, will achieve competences required by the Care Certificate as part of their induction.

5.       It is not a requirement that the Care Certificate is achieved within 12 weeks – this is the average time taken for an employee new to health and social care to demonstrate the expected competences.

Embrace do not make any of the false claims highlighted in the article.

Our resources alone do not equate to a care certificate.  They are designed to facilitate and enhance the learning experience, by replacing the relatively mundane documentation freely available with engaging multi-media courseware.  

We make it clear that employers must observe their learners and sign off competencies as they are completed.  Our workbooks facilitate this process, they do not replace it.  The Learner Management System is also part of the package.  We are pleased Skills for Care have highlighted these points to clarify for employers the false claims made by some training and e-learning providers.

If you would like more information about our Care Certificate e-learning course, or our other health and social care courses, please give us a call on 0161 928 9987. We offer free advice and can talk you through the most suitable and cost effective solutions to meet your specific requirements.

To view the modules covered in our Care Certificate course please follow this link. 

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.