Thursday 19 September 2013

Why we need to make every visit count

During such difficult economic times, with public service budgets under severe pressure, there are many reasons why we must make every visit count. First and foremost, for our clients. Care & Repair in Wales visit around 30,000 clients every year and this is the opportunity for our caseworkers and technical officers to discuss what their concerns are and take action, either directly through Care & Repair’s services or in partnership with others who can help. We need to make visits count by comprehensively tackling the range of problems and concerns identified. These include: 'I’m worried about paying my gas and electricity bill'; 'what will I do this winter when it’s freezing again?'; 'how am I going to get my leaking roof seen to?'; 'I can’t use my bath anymore' and 'who can help me repair my broken steps?' For the sake of our clients, we aim to efficiently resolve as many of these problems as we can, either directly or making sure that we refer to other third sector organisations, local authority and health professionals if we can't.

Making every visit count is also about making it count in financial terms. Our services prevent or reduce admissions to hospital and residential care by making the home environment accessible, warm, safe and secure. What counts here is the way in which helping older people to live independently in their own homes can take pressure off Health and Social Care services by preventing falls, preventing cold-related respiratory and circulatory illness, or by preventing the need for residential care by making the home safe and accessible. This makes every visit count for public finances.

Making every visit count is about providing comprehensive solutions to older people who need our help. It’s about being efficient and about working in partnership with others. And finally, it’s about providing solutions to help older people to live independently and reduce demand for Health and Social Services who find themselves under increasing pressure.


Chris Jones
Chief Executive, Care & Repair Cymru


Care & Repair Cymru's conference, Every Visit Counts, took place on 18/19 September in Wrexham. Did you attend? Look out for a blog post on issues discussed at the conference!

Monday 16 September 2013

Hospital to Home

Living independently is a reality if homes are secure, safe and warm and people over 60 have enough resources to maintain a healthy lifestyle. While in hospital, it seems issues of concern surrounding housing are magnified.

With this in mind, the purpose of our Hospital to Home scheme is to ensure that Care & Repair services are targeted at the most vulnerable in our society, especially those who are high on the falls agenda.

The scheme is aimed at not only clients but the professionals working with the most vulnerable and those at risk of falls such as Nursing staff, Occupational Therapists, Physiotherapists and Hospital Social Workers. The scheme enables these professionals to understand the services the agency can offer to clients to assist them with ensuring that a safe discharge is paramount.

On wards that cater for the over 60s, our caseworkers undertake monthly 'ward Rounds' during visiting periods, enabling engagement with patients and their families to introduce them to the services of Care & Repair.

The ‘Hospital to Home’ scheme is limited in its current form and funding is required to sustain the scheme further. The scheme is not just the 'packs' that are distributed containing information on housing options but the whole 'package' of Care & Repair, encompassing the ability of the staff delivering the scheme, the Caseworker service offered to patients in hospital to discuss concerns regarding housing and the network of organisations supporting the agency to deliver a holistic service post hospital discharge.

Many patients admitted to hospital are there due to falls within the home. The agency services such as the ‘Healthy Homes Check’ and Benefit Checks offered as standard can address housing issues that are of concern to clients and could be preventing a safe discharge from hospital. These can be undertaken whilst the patient is in hospital, thus cutting down time spent in hospital and consequently bed blocking.

Health needs to recognise the scheme’s benefits and allocate sufficient funding to support it. The scheme needs a dedicated Hospital Caseworker who will work alongside a multi disciplinary team of health staff and other organisations to ensure that housing is placed on the safe discharge agenda.

If this is facilitated by a strong financial commitment by government and rolled out throughout Wales, results would be a drastic cut in the amount of re-admissions to hospital and making an impact on reducing over-stretched Health Board budgets.


Nicola Eccles
Agency Manager
Conwy Care & Repair

Tuesday 10 September 2013

Facebook: The good, the bad and the ugly!

I am writing this blog just after running a competition on our Facebook page, and it was quite successful on one hand and a bit of a hassle on the other!

Our Facebook page started back in 2011. I was incredibly lucky to be able to push it forward with supportive senior management who love social media, use it regularly and wanted the organisation to embrace it. Our information services and human resources departments were concerned but after ironing out the lumps and bumps we were all of a sudden pushed into the world of social media. It wasn’t just new for the organisation but new for me too. I hadn’t done this before, what if my confidence backfired and something really really bad happened?

Helen Reynolds from Monmouthshire Council came to the rescue. I met her at CHC’s PR Network. She filled me with confidence and advice and her success spurred me on to think that I could do it too.

The first step was to ensure that all our staff had access to social media. Our remote workers enjoy keeping up with daily happenings as do staff that are on maternity leave, sabbaticals or maybe those that have left for pastures new. It also meant there were more people to help me!

Tenants can ask us anything and everything on Facebook. I sometimes find that I am a housing officer, maintenance officer, police officer, community worker and any other officer you can think of all in one! This means that staff across the whole organisation need to be involved or at least aware of queries coming through Facebook just like any other letter, email or phone call.

Staff across each department have been trained on the use of Facebook. Although we may need to increase their confidence, they are very much aware of its importance as a communication tool and the need to combine it with other methods of communication. This hasn’t been a quick process as it does take time to get political buy-in.

Up until this year, I hadn’t had a real problem on Facebook. I hadn’t had foul language posted, hadn’t really had abusive comments directed at staff and hadn’t had a persistent barrage of messages demanding a reply a second after posting it. However, we have this year. This means that you have to be on the ball. When a message is posted, check it, do something about it and reply in a timely manner suitable to the query. And if you have to delete it, make sure you explain why. Perhaps it’s because of the recession or because people aren’t hibernating this summer, or perhaps because more people are aware of our page, but this year not all our messages have been 100% positive. BUT we have also had lovely comments. At the end of the day, Facebook is a public method of voicing an opinion. It isn’t plain sailing and you need to spend time on it. However, it has benefited us greatly.

Tenants on Facebook helped us to choose our new logo. Tenants from Newtown have socialised with tenants from Pontypridd but have never met. Tenants have helped fight crime by reporting information to the police after seeing our Facebook page. Young tenants tag themselves in hundreds of pictures where they are abseiling, climbing and canoeing. Facebook has enabled us to access those who are isolated. Perhaps that is the main reason for being on social media, to help those that are isolated to feel part of a community.

Back to our competition... we ran a competition asking tenants to ‘like’ our Facebook page and write ‘I want to win’ on our ‘wall’ to win an overnight stay at a hotel. Although it was a popular competition, it took quite a while to get a competition winner that was actually free on the night! The tenants that finally stayed at the hotel had a wonderful evening and their reaction when they found out was priceless. The massive increase of traffic to our page and quite a few extra ‘likes’ helped too. We may not choose an overnight stay as a prize again, or maybe simply getting them to choose the date and location of the stay could have been easier!

www.facebook.com/newydd


Mared Elenid Williams
Marketing and Communications Coordinator
Newydd Housing Association



Tuesday 3 September 2013

The Three Peaks Challenge - On top of the world!

After signing up to the Three Peaks Challenge, there’s a couple of questions you’re guaranteed to get asked by friends, family and colleagues alike. Perhaps the most common one I had, after I’d cleared up the confusion of what exactly the Three Peaks challenge is, was ‘WHY?’

There were a few points during the challenge when I asked myself much the same. After the long (very long!) trip to Glencoe, a few questionable service station toilets, a luxury coach inspiring some minibus envy from Rhian, and unfathomable amounts of Haribo consumed, all most of us really wanted to do was sleep. However, there was work to be done. With 25 miles of mountain walking on the horizon, there was food to be prepared…




'Tired but smiling at the thought of eating all this tomorrow... '


Everyone mucked in, and a rather haphazard production line churned out literally hundreds of bread rolls and countless boxes of pasta to keep us going. The next challenge we all thankfully completed successfully was not committing the ultimate social faux pas and snoring in a room full of our colleagues and friends.

After a few hours of sleep, we loaded ourselves up with carbs (and a few whiskey tasters at the visitors' centre), took a few nervous glances at the skyline and started our journey up Ben Nevis.



'Which way to Ben Nevis?'


Now, we all knew Ben Nevis was the longest of the three walks, but I don’t think any of us realised quite how long it was. The first half of the walk is relatively shallow, with lots of guessing which peak you’re actually heading towards, but once you’re past the waterfall the real climb begins. The ‘zig-zags' of Ben Nevis emerge out of the last of the foliage and towards the top third of the mountain, and I made the foolish mistake of counting how many we would have to overcome before the final stretch to the peak. For some, the reminder that there were '8… 7… Still 7… 6' zig zags left to climb was motivation, but I was left wishing I’d never looked at that map.



'Halfway there...'



 'The view from zig zag number 2, or was it number 3? I've lost count...'


But soon the zig-zags were done, and the last steep stretch to the top was in sight. Most of us couldn’t resist a quick snowball fight in the last remaining snow en route, but finally we reached the peak, and the view was worth all that walking.



'One down, two to go!'


The descent that followed flew by, and it was soon time to tuck into that food. Never did I think a Tropical Lucozade and a ham roll could make me so happy! A quick change and we were on our way to Scafell Pike…


For me, this was the most challenging part of the whole weekend. While everyone else dozed off, I couldn’t catch a wink on the bus. In the pitch black of a very early midsummer morning, we arrived at Wasdale Head. And so nine very tired climbers set off up England’s highest peak. 

As well as the darkness, the rain and the cold took hold on Scafell Pike, and the team split up towards the top as a couple of us pushed on in an attempt to warm up. We reached the top a little bit warmer, but missed out on the camaraderie and some terrific tears and tantrums towards the peak as we took our own little adventure.

In the midst of the cloud atop Scafell Pike, those of us who’d pushed decided to follow some fellow Three Peakers on their descent, only to discover they were taking a different route (and a fair bit quicker than we were too!). After a few panicked minutes emerging from the cloud we were on a different side of the mountain, trying to find our bearings. We’ll call our descent ‘the scenic route’, with an unplanned splash in the River Esk and a tantrum of my own to boot, but finally we saw some sign of life. The look on the Bed and Breakfast owner’s face when I explained we were lost and looking for Wasdale said 'I’ve seen it all before'. Somehow though, we rocked up at the bus first, and the Tropical Lucozade, rolls and pasta were lifesavers once again!

We were running behind schedule by now, and even an attempt at Snowdon was looking unlikely at one point, but after Rhian negotiated her way through a thundery Lake District and A55 all the way to Pen-y-pass, we decided to give it a crack. The Pyg Track was far and away my favourite of the three walks, but with night closing in and the elements taking hold, fellow walkers advised us it probably wasn’t safe to attempt the treacherous summit.

I should have been disappointed, but when Edwina offered me her hip flask to warm up and I heard Rhian utter the words ‘I’m on my way with pizza’ over the phone, the smile was quickly back on my face and I had the answer to that ‘WHY’ question we started out with. My legs hurt, there had been tantrums and tears, sweat, shivering and an impromptu splash in the river, but the laughter, the friends and the adventure will be hard to match. And the views weren’t bad either…



'On top of the world!'


Aaron Hill
Policy Assistant
Community Housing Cymru



The team raised over £1,600 for Diabetes UK.