In a series of interviews with the regional co-chairs of the Social Care Nursing Advisory Councils (SCNACs) Madeleine Anderson looks at the priorities of each council and how the co-chairs are promoting social care nursing in their local area.
In this first interview, she hears from the co-chairs of the Midlands council, whose regional priorities are using digital technology for data collection and quality improvement (QI) and raising standards in adult social care.
The Midlands co-chairs
The Midlands SCNAC is co-chaired by Anita Astle and Jo-Anne Wilson. Ms Astle currently works as managing director of Wren Hall Nursing Home and has long supported the campaign for a Specialist Practice Qualification for care home nursing.
Ms Wilson works as a registered manager at the Royal British Legion, and has a special interest in older people’s health and dementia care.
‘I’ve always been really passionate about nurses in adult social care because I think they get very misunderstood – nobody really knows what they do and they’re not valued,’ Ms Wilson told Nursing in Practice.
Ms Astle said her SCNAC role is a key way of promoting the social care nursing role, to ‘fight for equity’ between NHS and social care nurses.
‘It’s about raising the profile of how knowledgeable and skilful social care nurses are,’ she said.
The council’s regional priorities are improving digital technology for data collection and quality improvement (QI) and raising standards in adult social care.
Rather than seeing the priorities as separate, the co-chairs explained that supporting social care nurses to make better use of technology and data collection is vital for improving the standard of care that they can provide in people’s homes and in residential care settings.
Priority 1: Using digital technology for data collection and QI
The Midlands SCNAC is working with Skills for Care and Midlands Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS) to develop an online platform to better share information across the 11 integrated care boards (ICBs) within the region, to forge ‘communities of practice’ across the local care sector.
Ms Astle was inspired to choose digital technology as the first priority for the council following her experience in using the LPZ benchmarking tool which monitors patient outcomes in care homes.
She says data can help ‘hold up a mirror’ to care homes to better understand how they organise their care and to highlight areas for improvement.
‘I see that if we empower more care homes [and] more care services to take that initiative and get more access to information then their services will be better and we can raise the standard.’
Ms Wilson said the pandemic gave care homes ‘the push’ to use more technology in their services, such as in care planning and medication systems, but warns more effort is required to better integrate technology into adult social care nursing.
‘We need to analyse data better. We’ve got all these systems but actually a lot of places probably aren’t where they should be with technology just yet,’ she warned.
The regional co-chairs said they are currently struggling to get their local chief nurses and senior adult social care nursing staff to engage in their work in promoting technology use. But both acknowledged that this ‘makes some sense’, given the constant frontline pressures of social care nursing.
Despite this challenge, they shared several examples of good practice with technology in the Midlands area. This includes the widespread use of digital care plans which give staff easy and immediate access to contemporaneous patient notes, which were previously only recorded on paper.
At Ms Astle’s care home, ChatGPT and co-pilot are also being used to free up staff time and enable nurses to quickly record patient records, something that previously took ‘hours’ to complete in full.
At Ms Wilson’s care home, digital technology is also helping to enrich resident’s exercise routines, like when using indoor bikes with digital screens which mimic various cycling routes.
Priority 2: Raising standards in adult social care
While acknowledging that examples of ‘poor care’ do exist across the country, Ms Wilson stressed there was also ‘fantastic care’ being delivered across the Midlands that should be championed and copied elsewhere.
‘Social care nursing provision really makes a difference and if we were delegated more responsibility, social care nurses could really solve a lot of the problems in the NHS,’ she stressed.
Ms Wilson added that increasing the representation of social care nurses at ICB level and in regional social care meetings was vital for raising standards in the sector and warned that social care nurses are ‘hugely underrepresented’ in many discussions around care improvements.
‘I go to quite a lot of meetings in my ICB and social care nurses are hugely underrepresented,’ she said.
‘Actually, if we’re looking at the issues that go across the board like [hospital] discharge, or avoidable hospital admissions, the NHS nurses are kind of making decisions for us.’
Looking ahead, Ms Astle said ‘one of the difficulties’ in organising SCNAC work is around ‘getting senior buy-in’ at meetings.
‘We do get quality leads coming from the ICBs, but we get very few chief nurses attending,’ she added.
‘We’re trying to make a difference but without any authority or money, and it’s very difficult with all the challenges that exist.’
Also last week, a report from the King’s Fund found that unfunded costs such as staffing have led to fewer people receiving publicly funded social care.
In January, the government launched an independent commission to ‘rebuild’ adult social care, but long-term social care reform is not expected before 2028.
Launched in 2023, there are seven social care nursing advisory councils across England. Each has two regional priorities to work towards to improve social care as a whole across the country.
