ICB Quality Assurance in Nursing Homes

The Quality Assurance Team is enthusiastic about ensuring high levels of quality care and support. This is underpinned by the NHS contractual responsibilities in relation to the contract management and oversight of commissioned services.

Our team offers guidance and support to Birmingham and Solihull (BSol) nursing homes to meet the quality standards and requirements of the NHS and regulators.

Support service

We offer a support service which includes:

  • Helping identify where systems and processes are not effective and where improvements can be made.
  • Providing you with resources, advice, guidance, and information on improving quality in all aspects of your service provision.
  • Supporting you to develop and implement an effective quality assurance programme that will provide long term benefits in maintaining the quality of your service.
  • Linking you to other teams and resources to support continued improvement.
  • Helping you to identify the reason(s) for any non-compliance following a Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection and supporting you to develop an action plan to enable you to return to compliance.

How we collaborate with providers 

There are a number of ways in which we collaborate with providers:

  • We will attend meetings with locality-based providers, commissioners, and operational social care colleagues to support routine opportunities for communication and engagement.
  • We will discuss with you the areas you require help with.
  • We will tailor our support to meet your specific needs.
  • We may visit your service to look at how policies and procedures are put into practice.
  • We will review documentation currently in use at your service.
  • We will make recommendations and offer advice to make improvements.
  • We will send you a written report following our visit, identifying what is going well, and making suggestions you may wish to consider to improve quality.
  • We adopt a collaborative approach with the intention of supporting providers.

Our team includes staff with considerable professional experience of working with and for health and care services and working successfully with service providers and managers to identify and plan improvements to the quality of their service.

Quality improvement resources and tools

React To is a series of training resources specifically designed for care home staff and other healthcare providers:

  • React to Red
  • React to Falls
  • React to Frailty
  • React to Home Rounds
  • React to Stroke
  • React to Deterioration
  • React to Quality Improvement
  • React to Dementia
  • React to Feet
  • React to Moisture
  • React to Infection

Find out more here. 

The Safer Provision and Caring Excellence programme, otherwise known as SPACE, has been developed by the West Midlands Patient Safety Collaborative (WMPSC), and was designed and delivered in collaboration with Walsall Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and Wolverhampton CCG.  Please note you will need to register and access these resources.

Resources included

  • Reducing Medication Interruptions Toolkit
  • Appreciative Enquiry Resources
  • Urinary Tract Infection (UTI) Toolkit for care homes
  • Pressure Ulcers QI toolkit for Care Homes
  • Oral Care and Chest Infection Toolkit
  • Falls QI toolkit
  • Deterioration Toolkit
  • Challenging Behaviour toolkit

Digital learning module is a short course to support managers and leaders to  learn from events, accidents and incidents and implement practical approaches to mitigate these reoccurring.

To support adult social care providers in England to find the time to undertake this course, Skills for Care’s Workforce Development Fund can be used to claim back £100 on completion of the course. To find out more about the Workforce Development Fund, who is eligible and what processes and timescales must be followed, read more information about this funding here.

Useful resources from Humber and North  Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership including a nutrition handbook, Vitamin D poster, carbohydrate portion control.

Sharing best practice

All care homes in Birmingham can now access virtual training by downloading BSol Healthzone Care Home App.

Learn and access the latest care homes news at the click of a button:

  • Quick and easy access
  • Free online and in-person events
  • Get direct links to contacts and answers to your feedback/queries
  • Regularly updated

Further information

If you would like more information about the Quality Team, please contact the team via email.