Spotlight on home care

We are currently researching home care services commissioned by Newcastle City Council (NCC). During 2010-11, NCC commissioned approximately 13,400 hours of home care per week to over 1600 people.

Social care services are a Healthwatch Newcastle priority during 2015-16, with the current focus on home care. This is for three reasons:

1) We don’t know much about home care providers in Newcastle and what people think of these services

2) Our stakeholders voted this in as a priority at the 2015 conference

3) Home care gets a lot of negative press; we want to find out if any national issues are reflected in Newcastle

Although there are several mechanisms for healthcare users to give feedback (Care Quality Commission, NHS Choices, and Patient Opinion of course) there are few ways for people to give publically available feedback on social care services.

HSCIC carries out an annual care user survey but this does not provide details at the provider level. NCC’s own annual social care user experience survey does not give feedback on individual providers. Comprehensive information on the quality of care delivered by the five providers in Newcastle is published on the CQC website but, again, there is no user feedback.

There are challenges in trying to gather social care feedback online. For example, the Care Opinion CEO spoke recently about the very low level of social care reviews on his site ‘Are Trip Advisor-style ratings the best way to measure social care services?’ The Guardian (6 November 2015 http://tinyurl.com/ptuds7l).

We have been speaking with service users (a seldom heard group), providers, commissioners and the voluntary and community sector to increase our intelligence over the past couple of months. Following on from this, three surveys have been developed which are targeted at service users, carers and relatives, and home care staff.