The latest in our series looking behind the scenes of neuro-rehab care providers focuses on Superior Healthcare, headquartered in Southeast England.
NR Times: Please tell us about Superior Healthcare in a nutshell
Adele Blythe (pictured above), Head of Complex Care: “We provide complex care for people in their own homes. We were established in 2006 and work with people of all ages, from babies right through to older adults.
It’s a nurse-led service, with a team of Nurse Managers who work with clients and families in the community, complete care plans and risk assessments, and then we recruit a specific team of carers and nurses. We follow a thorough recruitment process and deliver all the training, before the care teams start looking after the client.
We have 67 clients and our main office is in Whitstable, Kent, but we also have offices in Essex, Hampshire, Surrey and North London. We aim to branch out further in future – we can facilitate anywhere where there is need for a 24-hour care package.
We employ around 530 nurses and carers, and we also have a recruitment agency division of business, which is a staffing provider to care homes and supported living settings.
What are some of the advantages of being a nurse-led organisation?
I’m a Nurse by background myself too, so the caring element really does go right across the organisation. It enables us to provide up-to-date clinical advice and training and follow all the NICE and Care Quality Commission guidelines.
We know exactly what we should be doing in the way of governance. Having nurses looking after people also means that they have that insight into quicker responses. Some of our paediatric clients may be trachy ventilated, for example. So once we have trained our carers they can recognise deterioration signs very quickly. Having a nurse-led service means that we’re very responsive if something like that happens. If the clients condition worsens, we can refer back to the commissioner for re-assessment and request more funding or, at times, if the clients condition improves, we make recommendations to reduce the amount of care being provided.
We’re keeping people at home for longer, so we’re saving the NHS money too. If you didn’t have those Nurse inputs, you wouldn’t get the standard of care that we provide.
How is your referrals network structured?
Our clients are on the whole referred by case managers or NHS commissioners. We have a number of NHS relationships in which we are provider of choice for clinically complex clients.
If a patient has a medical condition such as motor neurone disease, MS or stroke, or perhaps a baby has been born with premature lungs, the NHS recognises that they need to get home and they commission our services.
Case managers working with us benefit from the qualified nursing oversight which a client’s MDT won’t always have available for them.
This means we can provide in depth care planning and the associated bespoke training delivered, with the care team signed off in the competencies required for care.
Case managers either work with us on an ongoing basis (some for over 10 years now) and others have utilised our experience to set up a safe and stable care package for the client before directly employing our team for the future – helping to preserve the client’s settled funds.
What are the most immediate skills gaps you see right now as both a complex care provider and a care sector staffing agency?
There are certainly challenges in spinal injury care. Trying to access training for bowel and catheter care, for example, is difficult.
There aren’t many specialist nurses nationally, so we’ve started developing our own training courses. We employ clinical educators, who are specialist nurses, and we now deliver our own in-house training and can also outsource this training to other organisations.
We hear a lot about personnel shortages generally, including in the care sector. How challenging are you finding it to fill your talent needs right now?
When Covid hit, we as a company made what was probably not the best business decision to lock down recruitment for a short time. We listened to government guidelines regarding socialisation and effectively stopped recruiting for a period, as also our clients didn’t want as many carers or nurses working with them reducing the risk, so we had a very small team working with each client.
Coming out the other side of Covid, the carers and the Nurses who had worked throughout, needed a break, and we didn’t have the new people coming through the recruitment process quickly enough to enable that. The clients were very used to the team they had and didn’t want new people coming in, which caused us some difficulties.
We are a national minimum wage provider, we have always paid well and our training is very good – but recruitment is still a challenge. There are so many people out there wanting good carers and Nurses. To help attract them we do a lot for our employees, such a monthly lottery, employee of the month and supervision sessions every three months from a Nurse so they feel a lot more supported than maybe you would get with other providers. Our teams also have access to an employee assistance programme.
Are you undergoing any tech-driven changes right now?
The CQC wants all care providers to implement digital care planning and electronic care monitoring, and so we’re underway with that. It’s quite big piece of work and the challenge is integrating the system we have with the new system so the disruption to the service is kept to a minimum
If you could wave a magic wand what changes would you like to see in the neuro-rehab field generally?
I’d like to see more social and work opportunities for people with spinal and/or brain injuries. For example, we have a few younger male clients that have had motorbike or car accidents, and some feel reluctant to get out and do things because opportunities are so limited for them.
Often those in a position to seek opportunities can’t see past their disabilities and it would be great if these opportunities were promoted to clients such as these and care providers. I’d also like to see more available technology that enables as much independence as possible.
