Showing posts tagged with: care home

Is there a future for luxury care homes?

The not-for-profit group Anchor, best known for its sheltered housing, is opening a luxury care home. The charity believes it marks the start of a new model of care for the baby boomer generation. But with doubts remaining about the future prospects for sector will the approach take off?

Set in five acres of Surrey greenbelt, West Hall is not the average care home.

The £30m development has 117 en-suite rooms, a hair salon, a library, landscaped gardens and a private dining room for special occasions.

The accommodation is housed in three separate purpose-built buildings, known as "clusters", while many of the communal facilities are situated in a listed manor house.

The rooms are all equipped with sensors which alert staff if someone has fallen or stopped moving and each area in the clusters is coloured differently to help those with advanced dementia recognise their living areas.

But what also marks the centre out is the level of training everyone has. There is a 12-week induction that covers dementia care which all staff, from the care professionals to the handyman, complete.

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MP Paul Burstow urges care home abuse penalties for owners

Companies who own care homes in England where abuse is carried out should face unlimited fines and criminal sanctions, a former minister has said.

Lib Dem MP Paul Burstow has argued for new laws to ensure care providers are held criminally accountable for abuse and neglect on their premises.

This would have tackled a "culture of cruelty" at the Winterbourne View hospital, near Bristol, he added.

Ministers said there was a "clear gap" in regulation to be addressed.

Mr Burstow, who was care services minister until leaving the government in September, outlined proposed legislation in the Commons, which he said would see justice for future victims of abuse and their families.

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Disabled and elderly home care: Crisis talks being held

Care minister Norman Lamb is meeting care providers later to discuss what he says is a crisis in care of the elderly and disabled at home.

Mr Lamb says a quarter of all clients in England are unhappy with the service they receive.

BBC social affairs correspondent Michael Buchanan says a priority will be ensuring visits last longer - at present some only last 10 minutes.

Continuity will also be called for, so people are familiar with their carers.

Hundreds of thousands of people are currently looked after by companies in their own homes and that number will increase in the coming years as the population ages, says the BBC's Michael Buchanan.

Mr Lamb believes the current system results in poor care, low wages and neglect, and is warning that there could be an abuse scandal in this sector, as serious as the problems which occurred at Stafford hospital.

Much domiciliary care, also known as home care, is paid for by local councils who say that a funding crisis - exacerbated by austerity cuts - limits the amount they can afford.

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CQC (Care Quality Commission) monitoroing deaths in homes

Death rates in care and nursing homes in England are to be monitored by the Care Quality Commission to try to identify problems at an earlier stage.

The regulator said it was piloting a system where a high number of deaths would trigger an investigation.

Care homes are required to report to the CQC when a resident dies - but the BBC's Panorama found that some homes had not been doing this.

The regulator has said it will consider sanctions for those that do not comply.

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'Excessive' use of face-down restraint in mental health hospitals

The government is considering a ban on the use of face-down restraint in English mental health hospitals.

The move follows figures which show the controversial technique being used hundreds of times a year in some trusts - a level described by a health minister as "shocking" and apparently "excessive".

Research by the mental health charity Mind finds that some mental health trusts no longer use face-down restraint because it is considered too dangerous and traumatic.

But figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that two mental health trusts employ the procedure two or three times a day.

The Northumberland, Tyne and Wear trust used face-down restraint 923 times in 2011-12. Southern Health trust, based in Southampton, used it 810 times. Between them, the two institutions account for almost half of all the face-down restraint revealed in the figures.

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