Parkhaven’s Christmas blog


As the year end approaches it is often a time of reflection and review. Social care has been in the news a lot over the past 12 months whether as a consequence of discussions about new ways of funding such services or because of the burgeoning numbers and interest in dementia care. The Trust approaches the New Year with great hope and optimism tinged with some anxiety about the consequences of forthcoming stringent financial times.

I have three hopes for the coming year. Firstly that social care services will receive adequate funding which enables charities like Parkhaven to provide excellent services to all; not just those with the ability to pay. Secondly that we are able to recruit the right calibre of staff; this is crucial to the delivery of high quality services and is of course dependent at least in part on the first hope, adequate funds, in order that staff can be paid reasonable wages which value their important contribution. Finally I hope that as an organisation we continue to be bold, innovative and sensitive and responsive to what the individual who uses the service really wants and needs. This should result in an array of bespoke services being provided so that they truly are personal.

I look forward to reporting on these developments in the coming year.

Happy Christmas to you all.


Hilary Rowland
Chief executive
21.12.09

Sisyphean tasks

Sisyphus was a king of Corinth who was punished by Hades for his misdeeds. His punishment comprised of having to roll a heavy stone up a hill; every time he approached the top, the stone escaped his grasp and rolled to the bottom.

Our Trust is currently involved in two seemingly Sisyphean tasks: one seasonal, the sweeping of leaves, the other, the recruitment of staff seemingly unending.

The Trust has the immense gift of land, swathes of beautiful parkland which is a joy to walk through at this time of year because of the autumnal colours on our well established trees. However if you are one of our gardeners having to keep on top of sweeping up the leaves, it must seem a somewhat Sisyphean task.

But so too is keeping all our services appropriately staffed. Our Trust employs over 175 people. It is one of the biggest employers in the area. But finding the right people with empathy, who are good listeners, who realise it can be the little things that make a difference to how someone feels and then to retain them is a real challenge. Turnover of over 25% indicates the scale of this task. No sooner than we think are fully staffed and ‘cracked it’ do people move on either to better paid jobs, to progress their careers or because they do not feel able to undertake some of the very personal care that is an integral part of a caring role. And as the myth goes the stone almost gets to the top of the hill and then rolls down again. We have just engaged in a successful recruitment drive. We hope that this time that those we have employed will stay with the Trust, enjoy their work, develop their skills and feel they are really doing something really worthwhile, so there will be one less Sisyphean task!

Hilary Rowland
29.10.09

What is excellence?
Parkhaven Trust provides homes for over 100 people: different homes for different people and different needs. There are currently 6 homes which are part of Parkhaven Trust. They all meet different needs. There is a small home for people with significant additional needs, another home in the community for people with learning disabilities, a specialist residential home for people with dementia and a nursing home generally for older people. What they all have in common is that they have been assessed by the regulator of health and social care, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) http://www.cqc.org.uk/ as excellent. Our Kyffin Taylor home for people with dementia has joined the ranks of our excellent services.
Currently in order to be assessed as a 3 star excellent service by CQC, the expectation of the service is ‘not for perfect services but for particularly good services, well managed and with a sustained track record of high performance’ (CSCI, QPM Document no 167/07). Interestingly they must have resorted to the dictionary for this description because it describes excellence as the ‘quality of excelling, or being exceptionally good’ (Collins English dictionary).
It is my belief that excellence needs to be constantly worked at. There is absolutely no room for let up and there is always room to do things better. In the experience of the service user everything we do is important. The Trust is launching a new strategy, CHOICES, in which we identify excellence as a crucial plank of what we want to achieve over the coming 5 years. Service users will be the test of whether we are successful in that endeavour over the coming years. But we are not resting on our laurels , a new service is just being developed. Work started last week on our next new project, an extra care housing scheme for older people. We will track its progress through this blog.
Hilary Rowland
8.10.09

A healthy development: growing patches

Last month Parkhaven Trust received planning permission for our revised extra care housing scheme which comprises 24 apartments. This is being developed in partnership with Arena Housing. It is a very exciting scheme which is part of our wider vision for the Trust of a health and social care park. Already the site has a GP surgery in the grounds, a nursery and a cricket pitch which is used by the local 3rd and 4th teams, and a one mile path which the local community can access. The extra care housing is another important piece of the jigsaw as are the growing patches for use by the local community.

This development is particularly timely and apposite. Firstly because of the demand for growing patches (allotments) and secondly because exercise and good diet are considered important in preventing dementia. Thus people from our local community can enjoy growing fresh fruit and vegetables, exercising whilst doing it and enjoying a healthy diet and thereby hopefully staving off the onset of dementia. Parkhaven Trust is determined to be at the forefront of new developments such as the extra care housing scheme for people with dementia, listening to and engaging with our local community as well as playing their part in prevention of a very debilitating disease.

Hilary Rowland
24.08.09

A swine flu story with a twist

It is several months since I updated the blog. It seems that there is something that is always taking precedence. It has been a busy few months, not surprisingly our focus of late has been on how we would manage an outbreak of swine flu in our services. A team from the Trust has been meeting regularly to put plans together and develop new policies that might be required. It seemed last week that our planning was going to be put to the test, when we apparently had two, then three, confirmed cases of the swine flu. The Trust put in to place all that we had planned and the team responsible for managing a possible outbreak of pandemic flu within the Trust met daily to monitor the situation. Crucial to us managing was that staff continued to attend, they did not let us down and despite being anxious they continued to come in to work. It was important that we had all the right equipment available for them: masks, gloves and aprons. Staff have also all been trained in infection control. We received excellent advice and support from our local PCT and health protection unit. A visit from the infection control nurse helped reassure staff. Because all our residents have their own rooms, and en suite, those who had the flu were nursed in their own rooms and the home remained open for visitors. Subsequently a few days later, after swabs were taken, it was found that our service users did not have swine flu but a more general viral infection which manifested similar symptoms. There is no doubt that this has been a worrying time for the residents concerned (all of whom are now getting better), their relatives and the staff and other residents of the home but we have learnt a lot from the experience. Inevitably someone will soon get the flu, in one of our homes, but we have learnt a lot and will be even better prepared as a consequence of what was in effect a dummy run.

Hilary Rowland

Worry, worry, worry

April 2009

As I write this I am not sure what I should be worrying about most as the chief executive of a small to medium sized charity. Should I be worrying about the global economic problems and how they are manifested here in the United Kingdom and in particular on the services that we are paid to deliver? Or should I be worrying about the possible impact of the pandemic flu and how it will affect our services and users and what actions we should be taking to prepare the Trust to reduce the impact as far as possible.

The issue about the global economic problems and how it is manifested here in Maghull is that pressures on the government, the bank bail outs, mean that there is less money for the public services. Clearly we are not public services as such. But the Local Authority does pay the Trust fees for people to access those services. The uplifts that we are receiving this year are very modest. The impact of this is that it limits what we can pay our staff. These staff are not paid highly, this therefore is a political issue. It needs political will to commit resources to pay a wage that truly values their contribution to ensuring that vulnerable and frail people are supported and cared for. Not paying a decent wage reflects on the priority that government affords such carers and service users they support, whether older people, people with dementia or people with physical and learning disabilities. The current economic climate serves only to exacerbate this situation.

In considering the other worry, it seems a fine line between being prepared but not generating panic amongst our staff and service users which can be debilitating and only serve to divert attention from constructive action. The Trust has convened our contingency team and will now be meeting on a weekly basis to plan and prepare so we are as ready as we can be to mitigate any impact on our services.
A challenging time for us all!

Hilary Rowland

Springtime at Parkhaven

It is that time of year when our service managers plan for the coming 12 months and reflect on the previous year. It is a time to celebrate what has gone well, what we are particularly proud of and what we want to do differently and better next year. Our ethos in the Trust is to always think that we can learn and do better. We do not stand much truck with ‘we have always done it that way’! In particular we afford a high priority to listening to what the users of our services have to say and what they think is important. These views and feedback are fundamental to the priorities for the coming year. In planning for the year ahead we ask that each service manager present to their colleagues their plans and reflections. The evidence of the Commission for Health Improvement, the precursor of the Healthcare Commission, (although not for long as it is soon to become the Care Quality Commission) was that departments within organisations did not learn from each other. We are determined to ensure that our services do learn from each other so that they benefit from the best of each other. In addition to sharing plans and ideas, the Trust has developed its own internal audit programme which entails different senior managers leading on different matters, visiting all the services and looking at their specialist topic on a regular basis. These include catering, medication, personnel, care plans, health and safety and finance. So as we enjoy and are inspired by beautiful surroundings with the daffodils in bloom and the cherry blossom just beginning to emerge we are confident that the systems we have in place do promote learning in the various parts of our organisation. These systems are crucial to the quality and safety of the care and services that are delivered and help us to work towards achieving an excellent experience for all those who use our services.


Hilary Rowland
Chief executive,
23.03.09

The opening of windows and doors during these cold economic winds

Welcome to the first blog of 2009. It did not take long for all those good intentions to be swept away before the first month has passed. The cold winter chill of the economic climate is taking its toll on this particular charity and requiring all our focus, wit and ingenuity.

In the middle of last year the Trust believed it had exciting plans for the coming year; a plan for the use of our large Bartlett building working with another charity which had great synergy with the wider plan for the site. This plan included an extensive new build for the site comprising accommodation and day services. It may be that this scheme will still be realised although a bit delayed, on the other hand the finances may no longer seem viable. This is very disappointing but it does now afford a window of opportunity. So one window closed, then a second window, but the closure of the second window actually opened another. Thus we have an opportunity to think again about the use of this big building which could become a significant burden. It actually offers exciting opportunities to develop and improve our services which we will seize. There is no doubt that the hardening and deepening of this economic crisis is forcing us all to be more resourceful. It is making us think about using what we have in different ways.

We also hope the current economic climate will have a positive impact on the staffing in our sector. In more positive times it can be difficult to recruit to the care sector despite the great opportunities it can afford to make a real difference to lives of people who need support. There is no doubt it has the potential to offer a rewarding career. Unfortunately the status of people in the care sector does not sufficiently recognise the importance of their role. We hope that through reduced employment opportunities elsewhere different people will consider a career in care. This will be a positive outcome of these difficult times and may open doors for people who would otherwise not have considered such careers.

These are challenging times but also exciting. We, at Parkhaven, hope that everyone has a happy and rewarding year and sees the opportunities that may be afforded by these constrained times.

Hilary Rowland

Chief executive

02.02.09