News

CCFTV recently responded to the news that a leading Care Provider was closing their homes in a particular local authority. That situation arose because the said authority stopped referrals to their facilities over concerns about resident safety.

We do not take any pleasure whatsoever in seeing home closures, particularly as residents at those locations are materially traumatised as a result. Having to move to a new care home with different staff in new surroundings is very stressful as several independent studies have confirmed. Its clear that relocating vulnerable elderly people in such circumstances will in some cases, shorten their lives.

It is therefore incredibly important that the sector understands this example of home closures as something that was entirely avoidable. CCFTV has been campaigning for many years for providers to adopt safety monitoring, not just to ensure service quality is consistently of a high standard, but also to ensure ‘red flags’ are not missed when a care facility is experiencing operational issues. Many providers who currently use safety monitoring technology, confirm that many of the minors issues picked up via remote monitoring have meant they did not become major events and then subsequently culturally ingrained as bad practice. Issues such as inappropriate use of mobile phones, incorrect manual handling, casual medication rounds, poor resident feeding support, blaring music left in rooms with residents who had no ability to choose, careless chat with colleagues in a residents presence etc are all examples of practices that have been eradicated at a number of locations, thanks to safety monitoring. Poor practices such as staff sleeping for long periods on night duty, dangerous medication dispensing, failure to offer fluids as scheduled, verbal abuse to residents etc have been noted on many occasions when a system has initially been installed. The sad thing is that staff perceived these matters as acceptable aspects of routine care delivery, until such times as they ‘watched the footage’ and realised just how poor their practice really was.

CCFTV has tried to work with care providers to shine a light on such issues. Sadly however, most providers have not responded positively and instead claim that those things don’t happen in their care homes. In reality, that actually translates into ‘I don’t actually want to know’.

We however will continue to seek a collaborative approach. Both providers and CCFTV have one common goal; not to experience any more forced closures of care homes. We do however differ on how that can be achieved. We would again urge providers to take a fresh objective look at safety monitoring, in recognition that after decades of little or no change in terms of safeguarding incidence, a new solution needs to be considered.

We believe that solution is independent safety monitoring and we would urge regulators and Care Providers to really work with us and consider safety monitoring as a recommended tool for use, particularly when care homes are facing challenging circumstances. We believe that any home rated as inadequate should be required to use safety monitoring thereafter, in an effort to ensure improvement is made and closure avoided at all costs.