Abstract
Care services in Wales are facing the dual challenges of increasing demand and decreasing resources so in 2014, the Welsh Government set aside a national Intermediate Care Fund. Llys y Bryn residential home for older people in south west Wales was identified as a pilot site to develop interprofessional management of non-complex wound care between care home staff providing direct care to the elderly residents and district nurses in the community. There were two distinct elements to the rapid evaluation, essentially focussing on non-financial and financial benefits of the project. These were collected via a semi-structured interview and cost saving analysis respectively. The project was well received by all stakeholders and it sought to improve the quality of life for the residents in the home. The financial elements proved challenging to estimate with certainty but even by conservative estimates, there may be a financial return on investment after six months at the care home. More research is needed so as to build up an evidence-base to support possible expansion of the project and to underpin national policy on service integration between health and social care.
Highlights
Similar to other counties of the United Kingdom, care services in Wales are facing the dual challenges of increasing demand and decreasing resources
In 2014, the Welsh Government set aside a national Intermediate Care Fund to develop integrated projects across health and social care [2]
This will be a combination of new wounds [10] and ongoing management but even by conservative estimates, there may be a financial return on investment after 6 months at the home. This might has been reached at the time of the evaluation as the care home staff estimate that there has been substantial reduction in district nurse attendance by approximately 50%. The reason that this project is important is because health and social care provision in Wales has different service delivering and governance frame works
Summary
Similar to other counties of the United Kingdom, care services in Wales are facing the dual challenges of increasing demand and decreasing resources. In order to address this challenge, at least in part, it has been suggested that the integration of Welsh health and social care services might provide some increased efficiencies [1]. In 2014, the Welsh Government set aside a national Intermediate Care Fund to develop integrated projects across health and social care [2]. The local NHS, Hywel Dda University Health Board (HDUHB), had monitored the visits of the District nurses to the home and NCWC was consistently a task of high volume and high frequency. The local authority of Carmarthenshire County Council supported care home staff receiving training in NCWC in order to promote their professional development, improve services and reduce the District nurses visits
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