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Project update: The COVID-19 pandemic had a huge impact on the East Midlands Patient Safety Collaboratives LPZ quality improvement project for care homes, project, and we were unable to run the LPZ audit in 2020.
After careful consideration, we made the decision not to continue with the LPZ audit locally and are in discussions about a longer term plan for LPZ, using the learning and evidence from the project and previous audits.
You can read more about LPZ lessons learnt and model for scale-up discussion paper here.
We are continuing to support care homes in the region with their quality improvement work - find out more on our support for care homes web page. If you would like to find out more please get in touch with This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
The LPZ project involved using an audit tool to help care homes measure the prevalence of common care issues (such as deterioration, pressure ulcers, continence, nutrition, falls, restraint and pain). We then supported participating care homes to interpret the results and use the findings to put quality improvement measures in place and enable them to track their progress year-on-year.
The project achieved some significant impacts, empowering care home professionals to make sustainable improvements to the care they deliver and improves the quality of care for residents.
Some care issues are more prevalent in a care home setting due to the demographic of residents and the likelihood of them having existing and long-term health conditions.
These issues can impact the quality of life of care home residents and can affect their overall health and wellbeing. In some cases, if the risk of a resident’s condition deteriorating isn’t properly managed, it can lead to death.
All of this costs the NHS a significant amount each year.
The Landelijke Prevalentiemeting Zorgkwaliteit (LPZ) – Care Homes Harms Prevalence Audit Tool was originally developed by Maastricht University in the Netherlands and is now used in Austria, Turkey and Switzerland.
On an annual basis, care homes were supported to collect data on their residents to identify the prevalence of common care issues. This contains information about working practices at the care home, a review of each resident’s care plan and records and completion of head to toe skin assessment of residents. They then upload this data to the secure online LPZ platform. This data was processed by the LPZ team at Maastricht University, who undertook an in-depth data analysis that generated information on the prevalence of care issues including benchmarking data to help care home professionals understand where they were doing well and highlighted areas that they needed to focus on for improvement.
Following this process, care homes were brought together to collect their results in an accessible format and received training and advice on how to interpret the data, how to put in place quality improvement plans based on their results and undertook training on relevant topics.
Routinely reviewing LPZ data allowed care homes to make improvements to the care they deliver, resulting in reduced pressure ulcers and improved continence and pain management.
“LPZ gives us more knowledge about common care problems that our residents are at risk of and it is a great way of updating training for our staff, having knowledge in areas that we are unsure about.” Beechdale House, Nottingham, Registered Manager
View our LPZ Keeping in Touch Vimeo channel to access webinar presentations held October 2020, December 2020 and February 2021.
LPZ Celebration artwork