LPZ – improving quality and safety in care homes

Summary

The East Midlands Patient Safety Collaborative (EMPSC) piloted an audit tool to measure the prevalence of common care problems found in nursing and residential homes. The audit tool was first rolled out to 26 care homes across Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in 2015, extending to 30 care homes across the East Midlands in 2016, 31 in 2017 and 39 in 2018. The tool is called the International Prevalence Measurement of Care Problems in Care Homes (Landelijke Prevalentiemeting Zorgkwaliteit, or LPZ for short, in Dutch). LPZ was developed in the Netherlands to provide a reliable mechanism for measuring the prevalence of common care problems within care homes and provide consistent recording of data to drive, or measure, the impact of quality improvement initiatives in the sector.

Content

Learning points

• The care home sector is a dynamic sector, with high staff turnover and this affects engagement and relationship building.
• Quality Improvement training needs to be tailored to this sector.
• Care home staff receive little training in common care areas, such as pressure ulcers, continence, falls etc.
• Verifiers are required for the head to toe skin inspection.
• Measurement leads to improvement through the identification of issues and trends.
• Care homes do not wait for the annual results to improve, they are motivated to act immediately during the audit.
• Using infographics is an effective and engaging way of displaying data and is well received.
• Whilst LPZ improves transparency, true prevalence is difficult to achieve and therefore benchmarking data more difficult to establish.