Outcomes-centric home care focuses on improving quality of life and independence, rather than hours and tasks
-- Outcomes-centric home care represents a significant change in how care services are perceived and valued, focusing on the impact of care on quality of life, maintaining independence, and ensuring care recipients feel well supported in the comfort of their homes.
This novel approach has been studied to determine how home care providers can best meet demand for professional care, amid an ageing population that now has nearly 11 million older adults who are aged 65 or above.
Guardian Angel Carers, the highly respected and multi-award-winning private home care firm, shares insights into what outcomes-focused care means and why it benefits families, individuals, and communities.
Understanding the Concept of Outcomes-Focused Care Delivery
We’ve been following the research conducted by The King’s Fund with great interest, as a project that looked into the ongoing challenges facing the home care sector and found that there are roughly 249 million hours of home care delivery per year in England alone.
This project examined how care is ‘bought’ and identified that emphasising quality and real-world outcomes is a stronger focus than concentrating solely on the number of hours of care provided.
In brief, outcomes-focused care treats outcomes as the primary deliverable, rather than how long carers spend with a person each day or week. This effectively places the health, happiness, and well-being of the individual at the heart of the care planning process.
Outcomes do, of course, vary but might include improvements in a person’s medical welfare, reductions in hospital admissions, progress towards recovery from a hospital stay or a rehabilitation programme, or positive changes in how a person feels about their quality of life and ability to remain well at home.
This is a considerable change from the convention, which is to regard care as a service based on ‘time and task’, which considers the functions of care, not the outcomes, as the principal purpose.
In contrast, outcomes-centric care focuses on what matters most to the person receiving care, and how care professionals can best meet those needs, not a tick list of actions or tasks that, once completed, are seen as having delivered the appropriate care.
Exploring the Benefits of Outcomes-Focused Care for the UK Home Care Sector
The overarching aim of a home care provider is to ensure that care recipients feel happy and supported, and that families have the peace of mind that their loved one's wishes and needs are being met with compassion and respect.
However, reliance on policies many consider outdated means some individuals, particularly those with evolving needs or progressive health conditions, continue to receive generic care that doesn’t keep pace with their priorities.
Guardian Angel Carers wholeheartedly supports the adoption of outcomes-focused care across the wider health and social care sector, as it ensures care isn’t standardised and is appropriately person-centred, considering what matters to the individual and factoring in their preferences and values.
Importantly, monitoring must be integral to outcomes-focused care, with a mechanism for home care providers or local authorities commissioning home care services to determine the desired outcome and track progress towards it.
When appropriate monitoring is in place, home care teams can allocate resources effectively, continue assessing the value of their interventions, treatments, or support services, and update care plans as needed.
Conventionally, home care has been perceived as a transitional service between the point at which a person needs support to remain independent at home and the time when they need more focused care, such as when relocating to a residential care home.
However, with the right accountability and transparency about the goals the home care provider, family, and individual hope to achieve, home care becomes more sustainable and a long-term alternative for those who prefer to remain in their own homes.
Quantifying Measurable Outcomes to Make Results-Based Home Care Possible
In many cases, home care is a service that offers assurance, companionship and friendship, all outcomes that are impossible to measure or record. Still, there is scope for home care providers to think creatively and, in collaboration with care recipients and families, define what an ideal outcome would look like to them.
These don’t necessarily need to be medical, but can include patient-led outcomes, where individuals are empowered to create their own summaries of how they perceive their health and life, and can be honest about whether at-home care is providing a benefit to them, irrespective of whether this can be tracked clinically.
Home carers and support services can also rely on more measurable data, such as Clinical Outcome Assessments. These reports track the severity and frequency of health symptoms. This does, though, remain subjective because much of the information depends on the input of the care recipient.
One example that will be familiar to professionals within the health and social care industry is a tool called the Recovery Star Method. It works based on a 10-question format that both the care provider and the individual complete, ensuring there is a way to identify gaps between how well the home care team believes it is delivering, and how this aligns with the perceptions of the care recipient.
There is no single standard answer, but there are various qualitative and quantitative methods to assess the impact of outcomes-focused care, and these should be adapted to the individual's wishes and objectives, not those of the service provider.
The Impacts of Outcomes-Based Home Care in the UK
Although there remains work to be done, we can already see how interest and engagement in new concepts, such as outcomes-focused care, are impacting care delivery, with more of an emphasis on outcomes included in the NHS Long Term Plan, as one example.
The development of new technologies also supports this transition, with digital reporting and care-planning communication tools that enable real-time updates and the sharing of critical information between on-the-ground home care professionals and management teams.
For families and loved ones, the engagement with more advanced, patient-focused care philosophies should be seen as a positive, and a way to ensure that prolonged issues around carer recruitment needn’t result in poorer-quality care, but provide an opportunity for care providers to look more closely at what they do, why, and the tangible impacts they deliver for the people they care for.
Read more about Guardian Angel Carers - What to Expect From a Care Needs Assessment
About the company: Guardian Angel Carers is a leading home care provider dedicated to delivering compassionate, personalised care services. With a strong focus on independence, dignity, and quality of life, the company supports individuals in the comfort of their own homes, offering a range of services from companionship to complex care needs.
Contact Info:
Name: Vikki Craig-Vickers
Email: Send Email
Organization: Guardian Angel Carers Ltd
Website: https://www.gacarers.co.uk/
Release ID: 89180068
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