Care Home Enter & View: loneliness, oral health and more
Improving care homes for people in Lambeth
In September and October we’re carrying out Enter and View visits into three care homes that are providing block contract beds for Lambeth Council. The visits will support Lambeth Council’s improvement plans for the care homes, and it follows the council’s quality and safety review and suspension of placements in all three homes in 2018/19.
The homes we intend to visit are all run by Excelcare:
- Queen’s Oak Care Home, Southwark
- Limetree Care Home, Lambeth
- Windmill Lodge Care Home, Lambeth
All three homes provide nursing care, two offer dementia care, and two also provide general residential care. The visits will have a particular focus on loneliness, advance care planning and the oral health of residents. These have been identified by Healthwatch England as national priority areas for older people.
People deserve to feel at home
We are pleased to have our long-term volunteer Yvette joining our team for a couple of months, to coordinate this project. She has supported us through numerous Enter and View projects in the past and was keen to get involved in improving care homes. Yvette says:
Having good care home services in Lambeth is important, because we
don’t know where we will be living at the end of our lives, and some of us might end up living in a care home at some point. Being in a care home should feel like living at home, and people should feel comfortable, safe and secure.
About Enter & View
Our Enter and View programme involves training authorised representatives to visit publicly funded health and social care services in Lambeth to see what is going on and to talk to service users, their relatives and carers, as well as staff. Every local Healthwatch has a statutory power (Care Act 2012) to carry out ‘Enter and View’ visits to publicly funded health and care services to observe facilities and hear the views of service users and staff.
We go to see what is going on and to talk to service users, their relatives and carers, as well as staff.
It complements the Care Quality Commission but we do not conduct inspections. Instead, we focus on what the service is like for the people receiving them, and how their experience can be improved.
Get involved!
We are recruiting a new team of Enter and View volunteers to be trained as authorized representatives and help us carry out the care home visits. The training day is on the 19th in the afternoon, and we will carry out three half-day visits in September and October. This will involve informal interviews with any residents and visitors who want to talk to us.
The deadline for applications is the 13th of September.
Get in touch with Yvette at yvette.johnson@healthwatchlambeth.org.uk or call us at 020 7274 8522.
