We’re delighted to be working in partnership with North East London Foundation Trust (NELFT), Essex Partnership University Trust (EPUT), UCLPartners and XIM is testing a new and improved method of monitoring and measuring physical health for patients with mental illness.

The health disparity faced by people with serious mental illness is well documented, as are the multiple contributing factors for this. NELFT and EPUT are committed to maximising opportunities for their mental health staff to support people to improve their physical health alongside their mental health. Digital technology offers a potential tool to support staff, build confidence in physical health assessment and ultimately improve outcomes for our population. 

Lifelight is a software technology that allows completely contactless measurement of three vital signs (heart rate, blood pressure and respiration) in just 40 seconds using the camera built into a standard tablet device, with no additional hardware, making the process of taking vital signs much simpler and less distressing for staff and patients. We anticipate that implementing this technology will enable staff to gain confidence in physical health monitoring and detection, better supporting people to look after themselves, improve their health and prevent avoidable health problems.

The project will evaluate the effectiveness of the tool as well as service users’, their carers’ and staff acceptability of such digital contactless vital signs technology use on mental health wards. The aim is to reduce the distress and discomfort of having vital signs taken in comparison to current methods, and to enable mental health professionals to deliver more effective detection and intervention for physical deterioration or physical disease risk factors. 

Dr Caroline Allum, Executive Medical Director, NELFT commented “We are really excited to be part of this project. This will help in situations where taking manual observations may be difficult and allow better patient care. The staff are excited to find technology that helps them in their daily work.”

Hannah Harniess, Deputy Chief Executive, Care City commented “People with long-standing mental ill health often suffer a greater burden of physical health conditions. Technology which can help staff better monitor and manage physical health during an acute mental health admission could contribute significant steps towards addressing this disparity. We are therefore delighted to be able to support NELFT and EPUT to implement and evaluate the use of digital technology to improve physical monitoring of mental health in-patients.”

Dr Kallur Suresh, EPUT’s Deputy Medical Director, said: “We are delighted to have the opportunity to test the use of this exciting technology in our care for people with mental ill health. It is very important that we look after people’s physical health as well as treating their mental health conditions. This innovation has the potential to improve people’s health outcomes – as we could better monitor any deterioration in their health – and also improve their experience of care.”

Professor Mike Roberts, Managing Director, UCLPartners AHSN commented “The NHS Long Term Plan challenges us all to implement new technologies that provide solutions to key clinical challenges. This exciting programme is one such innovation that will help us develop a technologically enabled workforce to meet the needs of our patients today and tomorrow.”

New ambitions mean exciting new opportunities for the people and health and care services of East London.

Today we are delighted to announce our successful registration as a Community Interest Company (CIC) ensuring an increased focus and commitment to the health and wellbeing of the residents of East London.

Launched in January 2016 as a partnership between North East London Foundation Trust (NELFT) and London Borough of Barking & Dagenham (LBBD), Care City’s aim has always been to bring together health, social care, and third sector partners from across the system with researchers, education providers, technology experts, small and medium sized companies and social entrepreneurs to develop health and social care delivery and workforce models for the future. 

However as the Innovation Partner to East London’s health and care system, we believe that we should no longer sit within a single provider, instead our work should become a platform for whole system partnership. It makes explicit our intention to operate a not-for-profit mode and to continue to work for the benefit of the East London community. NLEFT and LBBD will continue to have corporate seats on our Board, alongside Barking and Dagenham College, UCLPartners and Professor Paul Corrigan as our Chair.

With a new legal status as a Community Interest Company comes new ambitions. These include:

• creating a Community Board, to renew, shape and challenge its work
• seeking to make data from its quantitative research in health and care available – safely, securely and anonymously – for public research
• enabling more primary health and care research in East London that generates public benefit
• continuing the work started by its new Test Bed programme to translate health and care innovations into training and recruitment opportunities that allow the public to move into and through heath and care careers.

John Craig, Chief Executive, Care City commented “Being an independent CIC allows us both to embed our mission and moral purpose and to apply social entrepreneurship in pursuit of that mission. We can move quickly and take some calculated risks to attract the talent, resources and ideas to power our mission. It also offers a great opportunity for us to focus even harder on the community interest in our work.”

Charlie Davie, Managing Partner, UCLPartners commented “UCLPartners strongly supported the creation of Care City in 2016, and wish them continuing success in their new incarnation as a CIC. We look forward to productive and innovative collaboration, especially in the areas of ageing, long-term conditions and mental health, and through working with Care City on our innovation exchange to speed up the adoption of technologies that improve patient care.”

Ceri Jacob, MD of BHR CCGs, said “We wish Care City every success as they launch this week as a brand new community interest company – helping them continue to innovate and embrace new technologies to better tackle the local health challenge and put our communities at the very heart of both their work and ambition. We have already benefitted greatly in BHR from their work and look forward to continuing to do so in the future.”

Are you passionate about improving health and care services? Do you want to have your voice and that of your community heard? Could you help us realise our aim of improving health ageing and regeneration for East London?

Join our Community Board 

We are looking for people to form our new Care City Community Board. Its focus will be embedding the patient, carer and public within our decision-making processes to ensure our work is led by the people we serve. It will include local residents, patients, carers, and staff from the voluntary sector, care and health agencies – people who have professional and / or lived experience and can bring that expertise to the Board.

We will meet six times a year and a small allowance and expenses will be paid.

About Us

Care City is a Community Interest Company based in Barking, London, focused on improving healthy ageing and regeneration. We work as an innovation partner to East London’s health and care system, bringing partners from across health, social care the third sector, research and industry together to deliver improvements for our local community. Everything we do is about understanding the causes of poor health in our local area and working to improve health.

Learn More

Take a look at our Community Board Recruitment Pack. Or give us a ring on 0300 300 1548 to learn a little more.

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Care City in partnership with NELFT launches Significant Care, a tool designed to help carers spot deterioration in their loved ones earlier and take the necessary action.

Unpaid care is growing faster than the population. Across the UK today, 6.5 million people are unpaid carers, supporting friends and family who are older, disabled, or seriously ill. Each day 6,000 people become carers, many of whom do not know how or where to get help. In April 2014, NHS England published “Commitment to Carers” in recognition of the contribution unpaid carers make to society and the need to better support them in that role.

Care City has seen anecdotal evidence from its partners that, alongside social and practical support, support to enhance the health and care knowledge of carers would significantly reduce the levels of stress and frustration they face.

Significant Care is an adaptation of Significant 7, a simple tool, developed by NELFT for care home staff to identify and proactively manage health deterioration in residents. When Significant 7 launched in care homes across Barking, Havering and Redbridge a reduction in admissions was highlighted, but the greatest achievement was that care home staff felt more confident in their role. . Then the Waltham Forest project, demonstrated the use of the tool resulted in A&E admissions from these care homes reduced by 33% and 51% in special sheltered accommodation.

Significant Care was developed in partnership with carers groups across North East London who identified a need for basic health and care skills guidance, particularly focused on recognising signs of deterioration. This paper based tool aims to help carers identify early signs of deterioration in the person they are looking after specifically related to their skin, toilet habits, mobility and levels of confusion. The aim of this tool is improve knowledge and confidence in decision making particularly across the four domains of Significant Care.

A new tool for carers helps them to spot signs of deterioration in the health of those they care for and intervene quickly.

We have started work on creating a scalable and accessible education and training platform which aims to help carers spot signs of deterioration in the health of those they care for early and to make good decisions about what to do to help.

Unpaid care is growing faster than the population. In 2011, there were 5.4 million unpaid carers in England.¹ Carers make a huge major contribution to society. Estimates show that the care provided by friends and family members to ill, frail or disabled relatives is equivalent to £119 billion every year.²

Last month alongside NELFT we successfully launched Significant Care, a paper based tool that aims to help carers identify early signs of deterioration in the person they are looking after specifically related to their skin, toilet habits, mobility and levels of confusion and take fast action. The aim of this tool is improve knowledge and confidence in decision making particularly across the four domains of Significant Care.  

Subsequent development has been made to following a recognised need for education and skills training to be more accessible. We are therefore working with Agylia to develop and test a digital and app based platform to deliver education and skills for carers. The Pressure Ulcer App developed with NHS clinicians and carers across North East London provides carers with 1-3 minute educational modules covering topics related to the prevention of pressure ulcers based on the Great SKIN guide developed by North East London Foundation Trust. This app is being independently evaluated by City University to understand users experience of using the app and whether the app contents have, improved their knowledge and impacted their confidence in their caring role.

Benefits of this new tool are expected to be:

• Increased confidence and knowledge and carers,
• Reduction in the number of health crises and exacerbations of long-term conditions among those they are caring for.
• Reduced associated healthcare consumption, for example, urgent admissions to hospital.

John Craig, Chief Executive, Care City commented “’Unpaid carers are too often hidden – we should tell the truth about the scale of their role. That means offering them respite and support. But it also means supporting them in the caring they do. It can only be the taboo and guilt around unpaid care that has seen the self-management agenda take-off, but carers’ knowledge and skills left behind. At Care City, we want to help change that.”

Debbie Wickens, Senior Tissue Viability Specialist Nurse, North East London Foundation Trust commented “Pressure ulcers can be life changing injuries.  They cause pain & distress and result in serious infections and even limb amputations. Unpaid carers are the vanguard of support & protection for some of the most vulnerable members of our society.  The skin is the largest organ in the body and for those at risk, skilled care is required to prevent deterioration and recognise signs of deterioration early.  We are excited to be part of this project which we hope will offer the knowledge and skills to provide carers with confidence in keeping the skin safe.”

¹NHS England, ‘Carers Facts: Why investing in carers matters’ (https://www.england.nhs.uk/commissioning/comm-carers/carer-facts/)

² Lisa Buckner, Christina Buse, Gary Fry, Viktoria Joynes, Ben Singleton, Andrea Wigfield and Sue Yeandle.

(2013) New Approaches to Supporting Carers’ Health and Well-being: Evidence from the National Carers’ Strategy Demonstrator Sites programme (University of Leeds)