Intergenerational Jewish care home rated top in UK for end of life care

An intergenerational Jewish care home in London which has been rated as the top care home in the UK for its end of life care, enabled all residents who have died this year to do so in the home rather than in hospital.

Nightingale House in Clapham has been named Care Home of the Year by the National Gold Standards Framework Centre for End of Life Care (GSF). The judges who included independent experts from the care sector picked the home out of 10 finalists, all of whom received their first GSF Quality Hallmark twelve years ago.

Nightingale House, a 215-bed home which has been providing residential, nursing and dementia care to the Jewish community for more than 175 years, was rated ‘outstanding’ earlier this year by the Care Quality Commission. The home is also the UK’s first intergenerational care home with a permanent on-site nursery. Their intergenerational approach sees children, parents and older people spending time together on a daily basis doing baking, storytelling and singing.

The GSF judges said: “Nightingale House demonstrates an excellent level of dedication to living well until the end of life, and of understanding and compassionate care at the end of life. It offers deeply impressive, systematic, individual and movingly compassionate end of life care for residents.”

The average age of residents when they are admitted to Nightingale House is 92, so staff are encouraged to treat every day as though it could be residents’ last. The care home manager Simon Pedzisi and his team also review every death looking for ways in which they can improve even further.

The GSF Centre revealed that the home has “excellent cooperation with GPs, who now see residents identified as being at risk of deterioration every Friday afternoon and their notes are then shared with the Out of Hours team to further reduce the number of avoidable hospital admissions which occur most frequently at weekends”.

Simon Pedzisi, director of Care and Services from Nightingale House said: “Without a shadow of a doubt, GSF helped us achieve the ‘outstanding’ rating from CQC. For us to demonstrate high standards of care means we are demonstrating high standards of end of life care because of the age profile of our residents. GSF is the foundation of our care which means it is the foundation of our CQC rating.”

He added: “Our philosophy of care is very person-centred but is also about relationships, treating relatives and staff as equal partners. From pre-admission we are already thinking about their journey towards the end of life and how we can facilitate the most comfortable journey in line with their wishes.”

The other finalists were Castle Farm Retirement Home, Dorset; Foxearth Lodge Nursing Home, Suffolk; Belsfield House, Lancashire; Castleman House, Dorset; Cornmill Nursing Home, Lancashire; Nazareth Lodge, Dorset; Southmead Retirement Lodge, Dorset; St David & St Christopher’s Nursing and Care Home, Berkshire; Sunrise of Purley, Surrey.

Professor Keri Thomas, founder and clinical director of the GSF Centre, said: “Against the backdrop of an average of 30 per cent staff turnover and stringent financial pressures on social care, for these homes to embed, sustain and improve care year after year, using GSF as a vehicle for quality improvement, is a really fantastic achievement and one that we could only have dreamt of 14 years ago when this first began.

“I feel so proud of these outstanding homes being accredited for the second, third and fourth time, like Nightingale House. They are genuine exemplars of excellent, proactive, person-centred care.”

Three thousand care homes have completed the GSF Care Homes programme since it was launched in 2004 and more than 700 have gone on to become accredited.

Martin Green, chief executive of Care England, who presented the awards said: “The GSF programme has been shown to be transformational, not only for staff, but for relatives and residents. GSF helps demystify dying, and encourages everyone to play their part, so staff morale improves and turnover decreases. In enabling better quality care, with better outcomes recognised by CQC, this helps differentiate quality homes like Nightingale House from others, making them stand out in this vital area of care.”

GSF is the largest national programme to help improve care for patients approaching the end of life. It assists health and social care professionals in providing coordinated, personalised care for patients and their families and reduces hospital admissions.

To qualify for accreditation, care homes must have undertaken the full GSFCH Training programme over nine-twelve months, embedded this into their homes for at least six months and then undertaken a rigorous accreditation process.

More information on the Gold Standards Framework can be found at: www.goldstandardsframework.org.uk

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