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The AHSN Network partnered with the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) to deliver a webinar focusing on primary care in care homes during COVID-19.
This is the second joint webinar from the RCGP and the AHSN Network, with the first titled COVID-19: Patient assessment and the role of physiology and oximetry. Access this first webinar here.
This webinar, Primary Care in Care Homes during COVID-19, facilitated shared examples of current good practice and collaboration between primary care and care homes, including resources to support virtual ward rounds.
The webinar was be led by Dr Jonathan Leach OBE, RCGP Hon Sec and COVID lead, with Anita Astle MBE, Managing Director of Wren Hall Nursing Home in Nottingham, and Dr Alison Tavaré, Primary Care Clinical Lead at West of England AHSN.
They explored ‘top tips’ for GPs caring for care homes, providing person-centred care in times of COVID-19, and COVID-19 virtual wards.
Themes of the webinar included:
Anita Astle, who provided a valuable care home perspective on the webinar, is Managing Director of Wren Hall Nursing Home in Nottingham and is one of the homes participating in an East Midlands AHSN care home quality improvement programme (LPZ) focusing on yearly prevalence audits for common care problems. Routinely reviewing this audit data, allows care homes to make improvements to the care they deliver. Wren Hall have participated in the LPZ audit since 2015 and earlier in 2019 Anita received an award in recognition of her work as an ambassador for the programme.
On the webinar, Anita gave a valuable insight into COVID-19 and the effect this has had on her care home. In normal circumstances, Wren Hall has 142 members of staff but at the time of the outbreak, they only had 57 as many where self-isolating. This made managing the care home day-to-day a real challenge. This also created additional challenges such as a need for staff to help in areas they weren’t trained in, adding extra pressure for members of staff.
Anita also discussed the difficulties of maintaining social distance for those that had additional care needs. She detailed a zoning scheme that the home introduced based on a red, amber, and green approach which proved beneficial in slowing the spread.
Communication tools such as Zoom and Whatsapp were highlighted as great for sharing best practice and deterioration escalation tools such as SBARD and RESTORE2 were given as examples of useful ways to communicate the support needed from GPs.
The webinar was extremely well attended, watched live by over 700 people. You can access the recording here.