As a system, there are around 1.8 million people living in Kent and Medway, and this includes people living in approximately 630 care homes in the area, including nursing and residential homes for older adults, people with a learning disability, and people with a mental health condition.
The Integrated Care Medicines Optimisation (ICMO) team was developed in 2020, with one of their principal roles to improve medicines safety within care home settings.
Prior to the development of the ICMO team, processes around medicines safety in care homes was not standardised and consistent, with no formal processes in place for incident reporting, safeguarding referrals and care home visits. The development of the ICMO team and the team's implementation of the Medicines Safety Improvement Programme (MedSIP) aimed to tackle the disparities across the system.
With the merge into the ICB, it was clear that process and practices within the system also needed to be standardised and formalised to ensure that the principles of tackling medicines safety in care home was consistent across the board.
Since the development of the ICMO team, we have succeeded in developing and implementing - Formal internal processes for reporting, reviewing, visiting and auditing serious incidents and safeguarding referrals, - Dashboards for reporting and analysing the above processes, to identify trends and areas where additional work or input is required - A bank of system wide best practice guidance to support care homes to carry out medicines management processes in the correct way, - A medication safety toolkit, to carry out holistic reviews care home processes when visited
