Supporting nursing in care homes: What matters to you?

We would like to invite you to participate in a short survey to share your perspective of future priorities for the care and professional development needs of nursing staff employed in care homes. For this stage of our work we are keen to hear from UK care home nurses and managers, health care professionals supporting care delivery in care homes and/ or nurse educators.

We are using a technique called the Delphi method, which involves establishing a ‘panel‘ who are asked to respond to a number of questionnaires. The aim of this method is to generate consensus between the panel, which is achieved by allowing panel members to reflect on the results of the first survey before they respond to the second round.

This questionnaire is the first of two rounds. Each survey will take less than 15 minutes to complete. Once we have received responses from this round, we will collate and summarise the findings and formulate the second questionnaire based on the initial response. A copy of our results summary will be posted on the blog alongside the second questionnaire.

You can access round 1 of the survey by clicking on this link (closes Monday 10 November at 5pm). Round 2 launches on Tuesday 18^th November at 9am.

Your views are really important to us.  We look forward to hearing from you.

News headline: Too much "awful care" is happening in care homes in England

Reports of poor care for older people in care homes are in the headlines today http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29547598.  The chief inspector of adult social care in England, Andrea Sutcliffe, acknowledges that good care exists in many care homes but that in about 2 per cent of care homes the standards are ‘not good enough’. Yesterday at the RCN Foundation Board we reported on our ongoing work to identify key issues in the care and professional development needs of nurses in care homes.  In the next week we will be sharing some of our interim findings on this blog.  The understanding, knowledge and competence of nurses in care homes directly affect the quality of care that older people experience in care homes and their quality of life.  Knowing more about nurses working in these settings is of great importance and this information gap must be acknowledged and addressed, to reduce the number of reports of poor care.