Richmond Mews a part of National Care Group /Shelton Care recently had the opportunity to host a virtual meeting with Deborah Sturdy, Interim Chief Nurse for Social Care for the Care Quality Commission.

Richmond Mews is a registered service providing nursing care for adults with a learning disability.

Mike Cleasby Quality Director, Natalie Woodcock Registered Nurse Manager, and Katie Fallows Regional Operations Manager met with Deborah virtually on the 11th of February. During the meeting they discussed the pandemic and the effect it had on the services and National Care Group colleagues as well as the wonderful innovative work that had taken place during this period.

Deborah had herself been working front line during the pandemic at a nursing home, so had first-hand knowledge of the pressures that everyone had faced. We gave Deborah some background of Richmond Mews and how it has evolved over the 30 years, constantly developing to support the changing needs of the individuals we support. We discussed how it became part of National Care group in 2018 and just how lucky we felt to be part of National Care Group during the pandemic for the support that we had from being part of a bigger team.

Natalie and Katie explained how National Care Group's approach to the pandemic had been so supportive. Taking many of the additional pressures away when dealing with the ever-changing guidance and processes and getting this information translated into workable documents that allowed frontline staff to concentrate on keeping everyone well and ensuring that people's diverse needs were still being met. The PPE crisis that many other people faced was also overcome, by being part of a national organisation, where full support in sourcing and funding took away pressures from the registered managers. Deborah expressed how good it was to hear that we were so well supported.

We spent time discussing some of the innovation that we had all observed during the pandemic. Including how our colleagues had displayed a never-ending enthusiasm to make each day great during the most difficult of times.

We discussed how successful our vaccine programme had been with the people we support and with colleagues and how we had been provided with lots of information in various formats to help overcome people's concerns and fears.

We did also manage to get away from talking COVID and discussed recruitment and the possible barriers to this in social care. We considered the benefits to be gained in changing people’s perception to what working in social care is all about and we discussed some of the adverts that are currently on the television and how they were now more relevant. We also talked about the NVQ replacement with QCF and how this had impacted on the numbers of people accessing training and development.

Deborah was enthusiastic to meet us and hear about our services and hopes to get out and see more services when it is safer to do so.