Carers

The IEV team takes a strategic lead on co-ordinating the Trust approach to supporting, involving, and communicating with carers in the following ways:

Carers Connect Network - The IEV Team supports and co-ordinates the network to ensure the Trust works in partnership with carers, families, carer organisations and the local authorities by listening to and involving carers and families. The Network has 294 members and has met six times this year. The Network has led and supported the refreshed approach to the Triangle of Care, promoted our coproduced Carer Awareness Training and the easy read and an accessible version of our Guide to Carers and Confidentiality. Following the carers week event in 2023, hosted by the Trust, the CCN supported developing core expectations for the Trust approach for working with carers, based on the feedback from carers at this event. This year we set two Trust Carer expectations:

• We will always work in partnership with carers/families in all the clinical care we deliver.
• We will always listen to, communicate with, involve, and offer support to carers/families, unless
  there is a very good reason not to.

 

Carer Awareness Training

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The IEV Team, working with carers, co-designed and produced a Carers Awareness eLearning module for staff. The learning package provides insights to the benefits of involving carers and gives more detailed information on the Triangle of Care standards. This learning is currently an optional development learning package for staff. This training has proved popular with the staff with 1352 staff completing the learning since it was launched, and nearly 800 staff completing it this year.

The evaluation of the learning shows that 85% of those that completed it were feeling more confident to work with carers, families, siblings, and friends .

 

Triangle of Care

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The Triangle of Care is a national scheme to promote shared working between carers, families, professionals / staff. It includes six standards for all services to aim to include and support carers. The Trust was officially accredited with Triangle of Care (ToC), level 2, in 2015. The accreditation means that the Trust is committed to change the culture of the organisation to one that is carer inclusive and supportive. Annually all services across the Trust complete a self-assessment in partnership with carers on how well they are involving, supporting, and communicating with carers. As part of this process there is an opportunity to highlight positive activity undertaken and to propose any changes needed to make sure that carers are better included and supported for the future.

In early 2023 we reviewed the process to complete the self-assessment and conducted a listen exercise with the IEV leads, Carer leads and senior managers on how we could make improvements to the approach and self-assessment process. This feedback led to: 

• Develop an online process.
• Provide more communications and support to complete the self-assessment.
• Demonstrating Carer involvement and senior leadership commitments to Triangle of Care accreditation.
• Provide feedback on all assessments completed.

This resulted in 151 teams returning self-assessments, a 100% increase on last year. As part of the process, we asked teams to rate themselves on the core standards for TofC but also for our Trust expectations, delivering a clear benchmark indicator of our current position.

DIAGRAM

If you have trouble reading the above image, please email: involvement@nottshc.nhs.uk

The self-assessment process is now online and is completely auditable, with a dashboard that has information for each standard with outline evidence that can be looked at from every level from Trust to team. Below is a snapshot of the Trusts overall position.

The self-assessment process also shared that 33 teams involved carers in developing their response to the Triangle of Care, with 9 teams holding meetings with groups of carers to discuss their approach, 8 teams sent out a questionnaire and 21 teams held one one to one interviews to check in on their approach and work.

DIAGRAM

If you have trouble reading the above image, please email: involvement@nottshc.nhs.uk

We built peer review, with carers and staff, into the process so all self-assessments got feedback on their submission and to guide and support the development of an action plan on the key area's teams should be focusing on to deliver better engagement and involvement outcomes for Carers. For example:

Rushcliffe Community Nursing team identified their Carers information pack was out of date, they planned to review this by linking into the local network of carers activity and the Carers Hub offer. This review has now been completed and a new Carers Information pack is in place as from July 2024.

The Evening and Nights Community Nursing Team identified they needed to better to identify carers and relative that would be in a property when they were visiting, so they designed a process to capture this consistently which is now in place and will be evaluated.