Josephine Wight Transcript
I’m Josephine Wight. I’m the manager for the Older People’s Team in the LevernValley, which is part of East Renfrewshire.
Reshaping Care is now a huge driver for the future, as we know that there are going to be a lot more older people and also people living to a much older age than before.
When you go through an assessment and you are looking at your questions that you’re required to go through, it’s about gathering that information to totally personalise the assessment so it’s their individual piece of work. It’s about them and it’s about the things that are important.
If you really start to explore with that person what that question is really talking about and are really interested in what it is that’s important in their life, I think you get into a different level of conversation.
If we don’t, I think, at that point, you’re probably at great risk of making the wrong decisions, maybe for someone, rather than with someone who has got a voice, and an opinion and choices.
Talking Points is an approach within Reshaping Care for Older People, that we have introduced through assessment and it’s crucial that staff understand that. So it starts to look at what are the basic rights that we are giving people that have possibly been taken away because of the environment that they’re in. It’s about people having choices. It’s about being safe where you want to live, it’s about feeing secure, it’s about having meaningful things to do in your life, it’s about meeting people, having meaningful relationships.
Not one person is going to make the biggest difference to that person’s life. Both sides - of acute care and primary care - need to merge together to get the outcomes that we’re looking for.
I think everybody in their life is entitled to take risk and people who have been in hospital should not be denied that risk because they have suffered an illness, have got a certain condition and that we feel as professionals that we need to protect them.
An example would be Ann, who had a dense left-sided stroke and was admitted to hospital and had a considerable length of stay. She was deemed fit for discharge and the hospital had said she needs to be looked after in a care home.
Ann being fiercely independent had decided that was not the choice that she wanted. Ann had an intense rehabilitation programme where her goals were set. She absolutely wanted to be in her own kitchen, making her own meals and that nobody else would be able to do that for her. One of the things that came as a huge surprise to us was that when she started to work in the kitchen, all of the skills that had been buried for a very long time came to the surface and it turned out that she was the most fantastic cook.
Had we not implemented the care that we did, Ann could have been living her life in a care home, losing her skills that she did have, rather than building on them.
Demographics are changing. Services are changing. Life for older people is changing. Reshaping Care for Older People gives us the greatest opportunity to look at how we deliver services, in partnership with our older people, to live the life that they wish to live.