Provider Corner - Consultations and Surveys

Dear Residential Nursing Care Providers, DHSC is currently in the process of setting the 2024-2025 rate for NHS-funded Nursing Care (FNC). This is being informed by a one-off cost collection exercise, run via Capacity Tracker. The survey is non-mandatory, but it would be great if as many providers as possible could complete this. We are writing to you now, to give you advance notice that the survey is expected to go live on Wednesday 25 October and will be open for three weeks.

What is FNC?

Funding is provided by the NHS to residential nursing care providers to support the provision of nursing care. FNC can help manage pressure on acute hospitals and supports system flow by reducing avoidable admissions of individuals with complex discharge needs. It can also relieve pressure on NHS primary care services by enabling nursing care to be delivered within the individual’s residential home. DHSC sets the national FNC rate which dictates the amount the NHS pays care homes delivering FNC. This is paid per resident, per week. Given wider inflationary pressures, we are now conducting a further one-off ‘cost collection exercise’ to ensure that we have the most recent and accurate data available when calculating the national rate. You might recall that we last did this in 2021.

What Information Is Needed To Complete The Survey?

We would like to encourage as many providers as possible to complete this survey. Although it is optional, a greater sample size will mean more reliable results, which is why we would like to encourage you to complete the survey when it launches. When you complete the survey, please ensure that you have data on the number of residents by funding type and payroll information on both pay and hours worked by registered nurses for the two months of April 2023 and September 2023 (or your most recent completed payroll period) to hand.

Once the survey has gone live, you will see a link to it when you log into Capacity Tracker. If you have any questions, please contact the DHSC FNC inbox at fnc@dhsc.gov.uk

For those users who update Capacity Tracker via the Provider Bulk Update Template and would like to complete the survey, please contact the Capacity Tracker Support Centre who are available Mon - Fri (excluding Public Holidays) 8am - 5pm by phoning 0191 691 3729 or emailing necsu.capacitytracker@nhs.net

We thank you in advance for your continued support and engagement. Kind regards, DHSC

The ICS is keen to meet the training needs of all front-line staff looking after patients who may be approaching the end of their lives.  It is a topic where help is commonly requested.

To develop a complete and holistic training plan for the whole workforce, we would be grateful if you would complete the survey via the following link by Sunday 8 October 2023: 

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/PMTLFRT

Once the results are collated, the ICS will use this baseline information to inform the strategy to deliver training and assess its effectiveness

“Skills for Care is currently working with NHS-TD to see whether we can use the Adult Social Care Dataset (ASC-WDS) to collect data on digital skills and training, digital qualifications, and specialised digital job roles in the sector.

Please help us to get this right by sharing your views in this short survey. Your feedback will really help us to make sure any developments we make to ASC-WDS are the right ones. We’re particularly interested to hear from registered managers, learning and development leads and senior managers.

Please click here to open the survey- It should only take 5-10 minutes to complete.

https://online1.snapsurveys.com/interview/d06cc913-20c6-444e-b99f-199611a03df0

Tell the Government what’s needed to make social care a better place to work  

The Government has launched the first major national survey of all care workers in all care roles in adult social care in England.  

The national survey of care workers, conducted by Skills for Care, Ipsos and the University of Kent on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care, is gathering information about working conditions, organisational characteristics, and workplace culture, to understand how work-related quality of life and wellbeing is affected.   

How you can help 

Please share the survey with the colleagues, providers and frontline staff you work with and encourage them to respond.  The survey will take no more than 20 minutes to complete, and responses are collected anonymously. 

Survey link: https://ipsos.uk/ASCworkforce  

Or use our communications resources, including posters and flyers, to help spread the word.  

We are pleased to say that funding has been secured for International Recruitment in the East Midlands!

Please see the attached flyer for details on what this entails and how you can get involved!

To make sure we are supporting you in the right way please can you complete a short survey here

What we’d like from you:

We are interested to explore the benefits of volunteers to the adult social care sector and how we can help build on the positive legacy of volunteering across the social care sector which existed prior to the pandemic and in some areas expanded during the pandemic.

We are reaching out to stakeholders across the sector to help us understand more about volunteering in the sector and the benefits it brings.

Please firstly downloaded the document linked below. Within it we have outlined a range of questions that we would value your response to. Please feel free to provide as much/little that you are able to. Please return this document with your response to Ellen Thompson: ellen.thompson@dhsc.gov.uk and Jojo Shahvisi: jojo.shahvisi@dhsc.gov.uk.

Click here to download Volunteering in the Adult Social Care sector document

Re-commissioning Unpaid Carer Support Services

As you may be aware, Nottingham City Council, Nottinghamshire County Council, and NHS Nottingham and Nottinghamshire have recently co-produced a joint draft Carers Strategy with local carers and carer support organisations. Following on from this, as partner organisations we are now working together to review and re-commission services which support unpaid carers of all ages, across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire. 

As part of this re-commissioning process we have asked for the views of partners across health, social care, carers, carer support organisations and community partners. This feedback is informing the shaping of the new carer support services which we will commission. 

Feedback Themes and Presentation Slides- Recommissioning Carer Support Services Partners Event 19.07.22

• To recap and for those that couldn’t attend, the slides from the event presentation can be accessed here. 
• The feedback discussed at the event has been put into key themes here.

Please see below link to Nottingham & Nottinghamshire’s ICS nursing workforce survey. The completion of this survey is completely anonymous and we are using the results of the survey to understand the challenges and risks that providers are balancing – we would also like to hear your views and suggestions for practical support which you think would help in an urgent situation

https://forms.office.com/r/i4CNt3U2pd