Here at Fit for the Future HQ, we are hoping that our bright and breezy stand and retro sweeties have brought more people in the independent sector to our project blog!
Welcome!
At the recent Scottish Care Annual Care Homes Conference, Exhibition and Awards 2013, we asked delegates (owners of care homes, managers, suppliers, visitors and support workers) two deceptively simple questions.
- What will your service of the future look like?
- What do you need (tools/information/support) to get there?
We had lots of people actively engaging in the conversation and putting their ideas up on our ‘ideas tree’
We took the answers and made them into word clouds – with the most common words the largest.
What will your service of the future look like?
The main suggestions from delegates centred around the quality and approach to support. People felt it needed to be person centred, include families and value things like health, dignity and independence.
People also recognised that their services would be integrated with health support and that they hoped that there was more of an ‘open and sharing culture’ amongst providers.
What do you need to get there?
Investing in high quality staff was a very common theme. People felt their staff should be paid more, that they needed more access to training (and funding for training). This was something that was highlighted by Scottish Care’s own Ranald Mair at the event.
There was one delegate who wanted to remove the ‘artificial boundaries’ from the transition from hospital to home or a homely setting ; it’s all the same person and all the same ‘pot’ of funding!
Interesting conversations on the day centred around the Liverpool Pathway- abolishing it, reframing it, training for it. What I took from this is that dying well is something that residential support services are exploring.
One delegate also wanted better ways to engage with families and older people themselves, with active participation at the centre of change.
Fit for the Future is dedicated to supporting the independent sector to make these positive changes, and as a group we will be discussing this feedback and how our project can deliver on some of the ‘things we need’.