Earlier this year, we took on new powers under the Health and Care Act 2022 to access local authorities and Integrated care systems. I’m excited about this development and confident that the new powers will help us shine a light on best practice as well as support improvement across systems. You’ll find more information on our website about our approach to assessing local authorities and integrated care systems.
Over the next few months, we’ll start to review existing data and documentary evidence for all local authorities. These focus on two quality statements – Care provision, integration and continuity and Assessing needs. We’ll also be piloting our assessment approach in up to five local authorities, before starting formal assessments later this year. These assessments will enable us to start to understand the quality of care in a local area or system and provide independent assurance to the public of the quality of care in their area. For integrated care systems, we’ll start to form a national view of performance, initially focused on themes in the Equity in access quality statement. Going forward, we plan to pilot our approach with some integrated care systems before starting formal assessments.
Smiling matters
You’ll know how important good oral health is to a person’s overall wellbeing. Not just to ensure they have the confidence to smile, but because poor oral health can impact on a person’s ability to eat well and enjoy food. It may even lead to dementia and heart problems. In our 2019 publication Smiling Matters: Oral Health Care in Care Homes, we found that people were not getting the support they needed to maintain oral health. Most healthcare plans didn’t cover oral health, and there was limited access to toothbrushes, toothpaste and the opportunity to visit a dentist.
We did 50 follow-up inspections last year with our dental experts and were delighted to see a significant increase in awareness around what best practice looks like. The proportion of care plans fully covering oral health needs more than doubled in that time (27% in 2019; 60% in 2022). We’ve seen staff teams introducing Oral Health Champions and heard of homes where the on-site shop sells oral hygiene products for people to choose their own.
We marked the launch of this updated report with a webinar panel discussion, giving space to discuss the findings, and opportunities to share best practice. We heard overwhelming feedback that there are difficulties in accessing dental care for care home residents. We raised this at our Public Board at the end of March 2023 when the report was presented. It’s something we’ll continue to watch. I’d encourage you to watch the recording of the webinar and to share your best practice ideas by joining our CitizenLab platform.
This is a great achievement, but it’s vital that we all keep working to ensure that every resident of every care home has all their health needs met.
Sexual safety
The care sector reflects what happens in society, and as a society, we’re not hugely confident when talking about sex and sexuality. In 2020 we published our report, Promoting Sexual Safety through Empowerment, which focused on keeping people safe and how people are supported with their sexuality and relationships. Our findings showed that support wasn’t always there and there were occasional instances where people behaved in a way that was harmful to others.
We’ve worked alongside Skills for Care and Supported Loving since 2020 to develop further guidance to support people to have personal relationships. Recently, they launched a fantastic package of training resources. These proactive, accessible tools for you and your colleagues to use will help make sure you’re having these important conversations with people. We all know that to support someone to live their best life, we need to see them as a whole person and support all their unique needs.