Everyone wins when respite home teams up with students of QMU
Leuchie House helps young people prepare for careers while benefiting from their knowledge and enthusiasm, says Mairi O’keefe
Over the five years since Leuchie House was set up as an independent charity providing respite breaks for people with MS, Parkinson’s and other long term conditions, we have focused on being a learning organisation, with a vision to be a centre for excellence in respite care. So having Queen Margaret University on our doorstep, renowned for teaching and research in the health sciences, it was inevitable that joint-working would come.
What we didn’t appreciate in the early days was just how extensive this relationship could become and the potential it had to help achieve Scotland’s vision for an integrated health and social care workforce. With a formal partnership agreement between Leuchie and QMU to be unveiled next month by Cabinet Secretary for Education John Swinney, we now have a raft of experience to build upon and an ambitious programme planned.
In 2012, we took our first steps towards working together by offering placements to students on QMU’S MSC in Physiotherapy. Over the past five years, this flow of students has become an important element of our in-house physio service, paving the way for other areas of joint working. We now offer three six-week placements each year to two postgraduate physio students and have plans to offer up to six more placements to BSC students too.
For the students, it offers a clinical opportunity to work with people with longterm neurological conditions – something they wouldn’t get a chance to do in a conventional hospital setting. Working with our guests on a daily basis over the duration of their 11-day holiday brings interpersonal and communications skills to the fore, and through our assessment and referrals process, allows them to experience multi-disciplinary working in action.
For Leuchie House, working with these students keeps us in tune with the latest practice and helps us to continually reflect on the way we do things to ensure we are offering the best possible service to our guests.
Our integrated internal model brings together Leuchie’s physio service with our nursing, care and other therapy services to provide an all-encompassing person-centred approach. This means that the way we work with QMU’S physiotherapy students has a clear application to all the other aspects of our service. For example, QMU’S new MSC in Personcentred Practice offers an obvious platform for knowledge exchange. The possibility of a new programme focused on nurse-led care opens up exciting opportunities not just for but across Scotland’s health and social care sector. And with access to QMU’S wider therapy-based care provision including music and art therapy, we will soon be able to add a very welcome extra dimension to our guest activity programme.
The new partnership has also opened up exciting opportunities for innovative research projects, which have the potential to help develop creative solutions to the integration of health and social care.
Media profiles of the strain on social services in providing continuing care services to people with longterm conditions are commonplace these days. Understanding how services such as those provided by Leuchie House can best be expanded and extended across health and social care systems is vital for the development of integrated services. Sometimes the solutions to such integration are not just about restructuring services, but instead can lie in understanding the patterns of practice and how to adjust these in order to maximise individual wellbeing and overall health status.
One such example of this approach is our first joint research project, in conjunction with the nursing team at QMU, exploring what individualised support is available to people living with longterm conditions, and their carers. This has focused on Leuchie’s intensive assessment service – AKA the Leuchie MOT – and its possible application as a new model of outreach support. A second phase of this project is currently being developed.
Also on the cards for 2017 is a new research project examining the health economics of respite breaks and their role in providing anticipatory and preventative care, reducing the need for acute admissions.
Even on an indirect level, the partnership offers a host of opportunities to share learning and practice. As a centre for short respite breaks, Leuchie operates like a country house hotel. As well as nursing and care staff, we have a team promoting our accommodation, handling guest bookings and delivering perleuchie
sonalised holidays. This offers synergy with QMU’S wider curriculum, across events management, hospitality, catering, marketing and more.
As a partnership based on a shared commitment to social justice, equality, innovation and enterprise, such a rich and varied programme of joint activity offers many opportunities for the sharing of knowledge and evidence. It positively contributes to national developments in integrated health and social care, anticipatory care and person-centred care. And it will have a direct impact on ensuring Scotland’s new generations of nurses and allied health professionals will have the principles and practical applications to deliver an integrated service. That can only be a win-win for Scotland’s health and social care service and all who need to use it. Mairi O’keefe, Chief Executive, Leuchie House