North West Surrey Care Home Programme
The North West Surrey (NWS) Alliance works with approximately 80 care homes of all kinds (residential, nursing, LD) to support them to improve and sustain high quality care for all care home residents. This includes access to training and education for home staff, using outcome data to inform and support care homes when issues arise and collaboratively working to improve processes between partners, e.g. discharge from hospital.
The NWS Care Home Programme of work is led by the Care Homes Delivery Group with members from partners across NWS including acute and mental health NHS Trusts, community services, and care home coordinators. The membership of the group includes a variety of professions such as nurses, pharmacists, quality advisors, medics, managers, specialist clinicians, and project managers.
Key services
Urgent Community Response (UCR)
The urgent response multidisciplinary service provides help and care for frail people at home. To refer to the 2 hour urgent community response (UCR) service please phone 0300 303 4741 and speak to the clinical co-ordinator.
CSH Surrey Single Point Of Access
Single Point of Access (SPA) coordinates all urgent and non-urgent referrals for community nursing, intermediate care, therapy services and our medical locality hubs.
CSH Surrey SPA or call 0330 726 0333
CSH Surrey Infection prevention and control
The North West Surrey Alliance Integrated Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) Service was created in 2022 with the aim of providing an integrated approach supporting our care homes across the North West Surrey area.
We are a small team of infection control professionals working across our community NHS services (CSH Surrey) and in partnership with the Ashford and St Peter's Hospitals (ASPH) acute infection control service. Our aim is to provide every care home across North West Surrey with specialist infection control advice and support.
The team can help you with reporting, guidance and training.
National Infection prevention and control guidance
- NHS England National Infection prevention and control manual for England
- Gov.uk Health and Social Care Act 2008: code of practice on the prevention and control of infections
- Gov.uk Infection prevention and control in adult social care: acute respiratory infection
- NHS National Standards of Healthcare Cleanliness 2021
- Care Quality Commission Infection prevention and control in care homes
- Gov.uk Care homes Infection prevention and control guidance
- NICE Quality Standard 61 Infection prevention and control
- NICE Clinical Guideline 139 Healthcare-associated infections: prevention and control in primary and community care
ASPH Community Dietetics
The Community Dietitians support residents who are tube fed and / or at high risk of malnutrition in care homes. The team also host remote dietetic forums where care homes can access guidance for catering issues and residents with a lower nutritional risk. Further training on malnutrition is offered to care homes through webinars.
Training opportunities
There are a range of training opportunities for care home staff provided by both local and national organisations. The training opportunities cover a variety of topics such as medicines management and administration training, clinical observations and end of life dementia care. Click on each of the headings below to find out more about training opportunities.
Palliative End of Life Care
- Princess Alice Hospice
- Phyllis Tuckwell Hospice Care
- Surrey Skills Academy
- E-learning for Health Care
- Surrey Training Hub
- NHS England End of Life Care
Catheter and Continence
Clinical Observations, including RESTORE2, NEWS2
Wound care
Medicine optimisation
Resources
- North West Surrey Talent Hub
- Surrey Heartlands Care Home Escalation Process
- Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals Care Home and CSH Escalation Process
- CSH Surrey — Applying the NHS ‘Houdini’ framework to decrease the number of patients using urinary catheters
- NHS England Urinary catheter tools
- TRIBE project
- CareFind — Find care home and retirement communities in the UK