Recognizing Early Deterioration in Elderly Care Home Setting - a Snapshot

Abstract

Aims

Our aim is to measure the baseline physical and mental health early deterioration recognition of carers in the care home setting in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. This is part of a larger undergoing quality improvement project that looks at improving elderly care in care homes in the region by implementing a training package.

Methods

The approach was to contact local authorities, in this case, the NHS clinical commissioning group North Yorkshire to identify a struggling care home. We then engaged the care home and designated a leader to coordinate the project. We collected common themes by using focus groups with both carers and our professionals which led to the creation of a 16-item questionnaire covering deterioration literacy. Finally, we electronically and anonymously surveyed the carers (December 2021) and analysed the data via Google Forms.

Results

We had 22 responses out of 30 possible. As an overview, 100% felt confident in recognizing deterioration, however, 31.8% don't feel confident in managing deterioration. 90.9% need tools to aid recognition, from which 45.5% find tools confusing. Only 50% feel confident to appropriately escalate the incident, from which 36.4% did not know when or to whom to escalate and 13.6% were not sure if escalation was needed but will refer to secondary care regardless. 27.3% think their escalation process needs improvement. When it comes to deterioration themes, 4.6% don't feel confident in identifying confusion, 13.6% feel their knowledge on confusion could be improved and 9.1% don't know how to identify, manage, or escalate confusion. 22.7% don't feel confident in identifying mobility decline and 9.1% don't know how to manage this accordingly. 9.1% feel like their knowledge of skin changes needs improvement. 22.7% feel that their confidence in identifying toilet habits could be improved and 4.5% don't know how to manage or escalate these changes. In terms of carers’ mental health, 50% and 13.6% have mild and moderate anxiety, respectively.

Conclusion

Deterioration recognition in the elderly is currently a hot topic. Recent studies highlight the need to improve deterioration management to minimize inappropriate referrals and admissions and unnecessary infection exposure of a vulnerable elderly individual. Our results show that besides improving the theoretical knowledge we also must think about a clear escalation process, an easy-to-read deterioration tool, and managing carers' anxiety as part of the training package.