The Good Care Group, a provider of live-in care services, supports people to live well in their own homes for longer by providing high quality live-in care services. This empowered the staff to better support clients and enhance outcomes with fewer clients needing to be admitted to hospital. The Head of Care Strategy saw an opportunity to equip and empower staff in the clients’ own home to identify the symptoms of a UTI, test for it and to refer the client to further care as required.
GPs were often unable to attend the clients’ home on the same day and would often schedule a house call in for a couple of days’ time, advising a call to 111 if they were worried in the meantime. The staff were therefore unable to accurately articulate the needs of the client when speaking with the clients’ GP or other healthcare professionals. There was a higher than expected number of clients being admitted to hospital with a UTI or a UTI associated condition.įeedback from staff identified that clients were frequently seen as being ‘not right’ or ‘out of sorts’ before they were found to have a UTI, but were unable to express more specific detail about what was wrong. The Head of Care Strategy identified unwarranted variation when assessing hospital admissions data from incidents such as slips, trips or falls and from staff feedback.
UTIs are a significant cause of mortality, especially amongst the elderly population, with UTI related symptoms accounting for between 1-3% of all primary care consultations and being the main reason for 13.7% of community antibiotic prescriptions. The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR, 2016) report that UTIs are among the most common types of infections with in excess of 92 million people affected worldwide.
Urinary tract infections are caused by the presence and multiplication of microorganisms in the urinary tract, with an infection defined by a combination of clinical features and the presence of bacteria in the urine ( NICE 2015). Through enhanced training and support, combined with collaborative working, this programme has led to improved outcomes, experiences and use of resources locally. The Head of Care Strategy at the Good Care Group led on a programme to improve at home treatment and care for urinary tract infections (UTI’s) with its clients.
0 kommentar(er)
