Enter & View report on Extra Care Housing Schemes – An Overview
What we did
Part of the local Healthwatch programme is to carry out Enter and View Visits to health and social care services. The aim of these visits is to find out how services are being run and make recommendations where there are areas for improvement.
A current strategic priority for the use of our Enter and View powers is to visit Extra Care housing schemes because tenants in these schemes may get less chance to express their views than the users of other health and social care services.
The purpose of Extra Care Schemes is to combine the advantages of independent living with the provision of co-ordinated onsite care to cover a wide range of essential care needs.
We spoke to tenants across three Extra Care Schemes to report on the quality of individual care.
Key Findings
The tenants we spoke to across the three schemes were generally satisfied with the quality of care, shopping meals, additional support, activities, access to healthcare and the physical environment.
However, the biggest drawback to the quality of care identified by tenants, relatives and staff was the confusion surrounding the role of staff and the provision of services.
Our Recommendations
Based on the three Extra Care Schemes we visited, we recommend the following:
- Communication is vital. Many tenants are not used to speaking up for themselves and voicing their wishes. Many expressed issues or concerns to the Enter and View team that they had not raised with staff. Provision for some form of key-working, particularly for more vulnerable people, could help here.
- Good relationships and communication with tenants’ relatives is important. The role of friends and family in tenants’ lives is invaluable, but it is important to realise that not all tenants will have this sort of informal support.
- Visitors should be made to feel welcome.
- The needs of tenants may change over time. There was some concern that people with higher needs were not being supported sufficiently and that there were not enough staff to achieve this. We also heard complaints of alarms not being responded to quickly enough, especially outside of office hours.
- Activities do not always have to be collective and should, where possible, be tailored to individual interests and gender. In particular tenants need to be supported to go outside the facility.
- Housing providers should respond promptly to reported problems, particularly in situations which posed a potential risk to tenants’ health and safety. Even small things like changing a light bulb can be important for the wellbeing of tenants.
