What is Complex Care?
Complex care is a type of healthcare and support given to people who have chronic or long-term health conditions who need extra help to manage their symptoms and daily tasks. Examples of such conditions include neurological disorders, disabilities, injuries, and sometimes the use of feeding tubes.
All care is, to some extent, complex because each person is different, and each day is different we are bound to encounter complexities. So when people talk about and procure complex care what do they mean?
What is complex care?
Complex care refers to care for people who have chronic or long-term health conditions, including but not limited to acquired brain injuries, neurological conditions, spinal injuries, disabilities or even the use of feeding tubes.
Complex care needs typically require a greater degree of clinical expertise and involvement than most social care services, such as personal care for adults.
Complex care needs can be cared for through a variety of services, such as Home Care and Live-in Care (sometimes called complex care at home) which offers round-the-clock support to you in your home, so you can receive the care you need whenever you require it.
Visiting care which is dedicated home care on an hourly basis allows you to choose when and how you need support. Respite care is designed to be delivered on a short-term basis from either a live-in carer or visiting care.
Complex Care in a residential or nursing home helps residents to reduce the length of stay in a hospital and enables families to focus on their loved ones.
What is needed to provide complex care for adults?
It is important with complex care that the carer, nurse or clinician, is proficient in an array of specific care methods, as well as being able to help service users lead independent, active, and fulfilled lives whenever possible. For the service user and their family, it can be challenging to find carers with the experience needed for individual complex care needs. But having skilled complex carers will really strengthen the care you already provide.
At its heart, complex care seeks to be:
- Person-Centered: Complex care needs to be person-centred care. It begins with the human being, their strengths, and their goals, and leverages their relationships and natural daily structures to heal and sustain them.
- Equitable: Complex care recognizes the structural barriers to health and supports consumers and communities to address them.
- Cross-sector: Complex care works to break down the silos dividing fields, sectors, and specialities, and to build the integrated ecosystem necessary to provide whole-person care.
- Team-based: Complex care is delivered through interprofessional, non-traditional, and inclusive teams of medical, behavioural health, and social service providers, led by the individuals themselves.
- Data-driven: Complex care freely shares timely, cross-sector data across team members and partners to identify individuals, enable effective support of consumer goals, and evaluate success.
Core competencies for complex care capture the necessary knowledge, skills, and attitudes of members of the complex care workforce. The characteristic of the complex care workforce is the ongoing wellness-driven interactions with people with complex health and social needs.
What are the benefits of complex care?
There are a variety of benefits of Complex Care, a key one being whilst there will still be a need for hospital visits, a qualified and experienced carer will be able to reduce the number of unnecessary hospital admissions and be able to explain what the patient is going through to reduce the stress levels of everyone involved.
It also fulfils the need for companionship too, a lot of complex care options offer this as a service, meaning hospital visits are not the only time a loved one gets to socialise. It avoids disruptions to usual living arrangements, reduces the fear of losing independence, and can even reduce harm and variation, as the service user removes risks associated with in-patient stay and has fewer complex discharge issues to resolve.
Building and training your complex care team
The biggest risk for complex care is not having sufficient training or qualifications as a carer. The regulators look at care providers and the competence of care teams, and when caring for such severe conditions it’s key that carers or nurses have the most comprehensive knowledge on dealing with the complexity.
The overall aim of care is to have the right staff in the right place at the right time, providing the right service. With complex care, establish a workforce strategy to actively identify and manage those staff that have specific training or experience in planning and providing services for people with complex needs. The strategy should include a system for developing and enhancing the future workforce with the knowledge and skills necessary to work effectively within a multidisciplinary and complex environment.
It is so important that carers have adequate training, social care organisations that take the time to train and invest in their staff will maintain a reputation in the industry and wider communities as professional and dedicated providers. Training staff will ensure that the risk of accidents and injuries is significantly reduced, as staff will have the knowledge and skills to deal with complex care needs.
If you would like to find out more about the complex care services, please contact us:
Email Us: info@needsmattercare.co.uk
Call our team: 01908506567