NHS North East Lincolnshire Clinical Commissioning Group and North East Lincolnshire Council want to hear your views about what we are doing to plan and buy quality Long Term Residential Care services for local people who need that level of support.

Some care homes provide services for older people; others support people with learning and/or physical disabilities or people living with dementia or mental health conditions.

We have recently updated the service specification (the document which sets out exactly what we want a service to deliver and what it should include) for the 43 local care homes we buy services from in order to reflect the new legal standards required by the Care Act.  We have also developed a new local quality framework and scheme as we want to make sure all homes provide not only a standard level of quality but are also rewarded for going further with services that improve the lives of their residents. This could be something like providing special services for people with memory problems or with mobility difficulties.

Care homes that meet the new service specification will be eligible to apply to take part in our new quality scheme.

Homes first need to tell us about how they plan to go over and above the legal quality requirements and how this will benefit their residents.

A panel will then assess each application before signing them up to the scheme which will earn them a one-off payment that will allow them to invest in their plans.

We will review homes regularly to make sure they are working towards, and eventually reaching, the plans and targets they told us about when they joined the scheme. This will earn them a payment above the basic rate we pay care homes for each resident funded by the council or the NHS.

What sort of things are included?

The new scheme will focus on five key areas which are likely to include:

• Quality care delivery
• Encouraging mobility
• Maintaining links with the community
• Promoting wellbeing

A fifth area “Developing Individualised Approaches” is specifically designed to allow Homes that are achieving higher standards to identify specific areas of development to benefit their residents or allow them to work in a more imaginative way.

Before completing this survey you may wish to look at the following documents which provide more information about what we hope to achieve:

“Caring About Quality” which is about the new Quality Framework and Scheme for residential care home

Service Specification Overview these 12 pages contain the principles, outcomes and service standards

Service Specification Appendices these contain the detailed technical requirements for the service to be fully compliant with the Care Act. 

We would like to hear your thoughts about what we are doing.

Health and Social Care services are important to everyone and we also welcome the views of people who may not have personal experience of residential care home services. 

You can fill in our confidential online survey by clicking here.

If you would rather have a printed version to fill in please ring us on 0300 3000 567 or email nelccg-accord@nhs.net  and we will post it out to you. You can return this to us by Freepost, no stamp needed. You can also talk through your answers with someone over the phone, please ring the number above and we will make arrangements to do that with you.

The closing date for the survey and your comments is November 17th, 2017.