Cornwall Partners in Care News

Cornwall Partners in Care hold weekly briefings with Cornwall Council and Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation trust. These meetings involve Jonathan Price (Joint Director Adult Care and Health for Cornwall Council and NHS Kernow), Mary Anson (CPIC Chair), representatives from the CPIC Committee, and occasionally colleagues from the Council.

Daily update - 3rd December 2021

The meeting today included Jonathan Price, Val Smith, and Carolyn Montgomerie, along with Mary, Christine, and Richard from CPIC. Phil gave his apologies as he was having technical issues. We discussed;

• Would the sector support a further rollout of the Medicare system and is there any useful feedback from providers that were involved in the recent trail?
• Christine raised the issue that free PPE via the portal seems to be based on number of service users which, once again, disadvantages supportive lifestyle providers that deliver a high volume of hours to a small group of clients. Services may find that they are unable to replenish their stocks fast enough as Christine was limited to only ordering  small volumes when trying to order from the portal. Jonathan is confident that a solution to this can be found and Val offered to link Christine with Belinda Drury.
• The meeting discussed proposals for enabling care homes to open and fill empty beds. Jonathan shared a proposal that would compensate providers with £3k to help toward further recruitment and training activity where they are able to open a bed with staffing and equipment support from the wider system. In principal this was seen as a good idea, however there were some concerns around abuse of the financial offer, risks that an recruitment would only come from a neighbouring home, or that homes might open the beds for the money and without the proper support in place. It was felt that a payment to help recruit people new to care or coming back to care might be more appropriate.
  There was also a discussion around recruiting younger people into care and Christine outlined her work with some local homeless people, many of whom would be interested in career in care to help them improve their situation. This could be linked with a planned offering around housing using home-pods, which could be sited near to providers and where wrap around support such as mentoring etc could be made available. Mary also suggested linking with the Diocese who may also be interested in providing some of the support through their curates.
• Carolyn reported on the TR2 proposal where a link through Katy Hutchinson who has experience of recruiting in Bristol has offered a service to focus on recruiting people new to care or returning to care. It was felt that many providers are already doing this activity, but it was note that there are plenty that are not.
• Richard reported on his discussion with the Good Care Recruitment scheme run by Hertfordshire Care Provider Association who deliver a recruitment service that is similar in scope to Proud to Care and is funded directly from their local authority and is well resourced. They are looking to sell this service into other counties and would be interested in venturing into Cornwall. They also run a retention scheme which included an online portal for staff and employers to upload their training certificates to earn points and at various levels the points equate to rewards such as discounts at major stores like Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Argos. The scheme is well thought of locally and they are looking to offer this platform to other areas. Richard offered to facilitate an introduction with Val and Carolyn.
• Mary reported on her recent efforts to recruit from overseas following their interviewing of people from the Philippines, and of the 9 interviewed, 6 have been offered positions. 5 have accepted and the last one is sorting their paperwork.

The next scheduled meeting will take place on the 10^th December 2021.