When was essence of care introduced

Due to the high levels of compliance the details of all of the indicators are being reviewed to set higher performance targets so ensuring the highest possible standards of care. Skip to page content. Clear Information. Fundamental care.

The two latest initiatives occurring are: Nursing Care Indicators NCIs Every month 10 nursing records and other documents are checked at random in all general wards and departments at the hospital and in every nursing team in the community in effect, approximately records are audited in total per month to ensure that nurses are undertaking activities that patients require and documenting that activity.

Hospital Results The table below shows the end of calendar year position for each of the criteria assessed and changes from year to year.

The benchmarking process outlined in Essence of Care helps practitioners to take a structured approach to sharing and comparing practice, enabling them to identify the best and to develop action plans to remedy poor practice.

Essence of Care will be available to purchase in hard copy as a complete document, or as individual benchmarks. Bulk order discounts are available through the publisher, TSO. Check what you need to do. To help us improve GOV. It will take only 2 minutes to fill in. Cookies on GOV. UK We use some essential cookies to make this website work. Accept additional cookies Reject additional cookies View cookies. Hide this message.

Home Health and social care National Health Service. Guidance Essence of care Applies to England Documents. Request an accessible format. If you use assistive technology such as a screen reader and need a version of this document in a more accessible format, please email publications dhsc.

Please tell us what format you need. The indicators stimulate discussion within teams to identify the current position and areas for improvement which are then used to formulate the action plan. As mental health and learning disability services endeavour to deliver person-centred care, the benchmarks are as relevant in these settings as they are in the general hospital and should therefore be embraced. Essence of Care provides an opportunity to engage staff, service users and carers in enabling the best quality of care possible.

It can be used in the most unexpected of settings. One example is the Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility, which applied the framework focusing on four benchmarks — communication, privacy and dignity, record-keeping and health promotion — as described by Moghul et al The authors reported the benefits of having a structured approach to evaluating and improving practice within the facility.

Six years on and Essence of Care remains as significant as ever, with the fundamentals of care still often sadly neglected. The media continues to outline cases of poor practice and the Healthcare Commission produces reports that have widespread implications for health and social care providers.

Reports cover a range of care areas and include recommendations for clinical practice and service delivery Commission for Healthcare Audit and Inspection, ; ; Commission for Health Improvement The themes for recommendations are similar in each and include areas such as: communication; supervision; treating service users with dignity and respect; induction; training; staff appraisal; management of risk; and record-keeping.

These themes appear in Essence of Care, either as benchmarks or integral elements of them. With good leadership and teamworking, the Essence of Care framework can enable a continuous cycle of quality improvement and minimise the opportunity for things to go wrong.

These individuals operated in isolation but, through networking at a trust-wide forum, realised the potential of working more closely.

In response, the North Kirklees Essence of Care steering group was established with the aim of developing a coordinated and cohesive approach to implementation. It also provided a platform for sharing practice, exchanging ideas and discussing the difficulties and barriers associated with the initiative. One of the barriers perceived by the steering group was the format of the Essence of Care document and the assumption by teams that the method of implementation was not negotiable.

The role of the leads was therefore to promote creative thinking and introduce a degree of flexibility while supporting the consistent use of the tool in all teams across all care groups. Initially, the steering group focused on raising the profile of Essence of Care, as anecdotal evidence suggested that the majority of staff were unfamiliar with the toolkit and sceptical about the potential impact of benchmarking.

Workshops were organised to offer staff opportunities to gain information on Essence of Care benchmarks and the process, share examples of good practice achieved by using the tool and to raise questions. Each clinical team in each care group was given a resource file containing the benchmarks and associated journal articles.

The file was designed to enable teams to add to the information over time. The benchmark was implemented via teams so they could focus on the unique needs of their own care. At this stage staff were beginning to see tangible benefits associated with the initiative and were adopting some of the developments that were transferable between teams and care groups.

The workshop also generated a degree of healthy competition among teams and there was increased activity evident after the day. Three staff from the community mental health team CMHT for older people Lillian France and Larraine Whiteley — both community psychiatric nurses, and Linda Thompson, an occupational therapist began looking at the communication benchmark in January and, shortly afterwards, introduced it to the multidisciplinary team.

In addition, the team divided into smaller groups to address different factors in more detail then fed back on their activity at monthly team meetings. Obstacles encountered included staff availability, capacity issues and non-nursing members of the team perceiving the tool to be nurse-orientated. Some initially regarded practice within the team to be at an optimum level and as a result dismissed the need for it.

A trust-wide Essence of Care event in , organised by the head of nursing development, provided an opportunity for team members to present local outcomes from benchmarking activity to a wider audience.

As the communication benchmark progressed, the nutrition benchmark was being addressed at a well-established nutrition forum facilitated by Elaine Lane, a senior dietitian. Food and nutrition are fundamental human needs, essential to life, preventing malnutrition and its associated consequences. Eating is also an important social interaction. For service users who may have a learning disability, depression, anxiety or dementia the social interaction and enjoyment of food and mealtimes can be therapeutic in itself, while the promotion of a good nutritional status can prevent pressure ulcers and constipation and maintain muscle mass and power in limbs, thus preventing falls.

The Nutrition Forum was set up in December with an initial focus on coordinating the catering issues arising from the Better Hospital Food b initiative. It was open to various disciplines that represented older people, working-age adult and learning disability services, as well as service users, catering services and the facilities department.

As a result of the forum, nutritional link workers were established to take forward Essence of Care. This provided a framework to map current practice for dietary assessment and screening, care planning, assistance with eating and drinking and dietary provision.