Thank you to our friends, partners and collaborators for everything you have done in 2021. We’ve been reflecting on a few memories from the year that we’d like to share with you. Tough times show us how tough people can be, and we are inspired by the resilience, energy and sheer good-heartedness of our health and care colleagues in East London.

It is a privilege for Care City to work alongside you and in the process, we have picked up something. (Not that. All guidelines were followed). We have taken from clinicians and care staff an absolute determination that this pandemic be made to mean something good. Care City has a special responsibility to help out in the crisis and to nurture insights and innovations that can ultimately help to make that happen.

We started the year with two team members temporarily redeployed to NHS Nightingale London and pausing projects as efforts on the vaccination programme gathered pace. We’re ending the year with a very welcome addition to the team, Marisa, a Year Here Fellow and excitement about projects already in plan for 2022. 

But we should all take time to reflect on 2021. Throughout the struggles, our spirits have been lifted by the stories of incredible achievement and dedication to fighting COVID19. And a huge thank you to the relentlessness that our Care City team has shown in keeping our Community Interest Company focussed on not just how we can help the pandemic effort, but also the people of East London we serve.

Our Community Board has been a constant source of support to us this year, keeping us rooted in the needs of our East London residents. And it is with great excitement that we launched our new Young Person’s Panel this month, a team of seven extraordinary students, volunteering their time to help us ensure that the work we do resonates with our young audience and inspires them to consider future careers in health and social care.

From Apprentice Nurse Associates to XR in Healthcare, we’ve been involved in many diverse innovation, development and research projects throughout 2021. Our Frailty research, commissioned by UCLPartners, saw us engaging with a broad range of people beginning to experience frailty and related health services. We sought to understand their thoughts, feelings and vocabulary around frailty and communicate these findings to enable clinicians to have richer conversations about the subject with as diverse a range of individuals as possible. 

Other areas of our research have looked at ways to improve pay in the local adult homecare sector, including how we ensure more care workers in Barking and Dagenham earn a London Living Wage. Research collaboration with other NEL groups has enabled us to make recommendations for addressing the lack of uptake in virtual and remote consultations for dementia diagnosis and treatment and scoping the requirements for a virtual dementia care improvement community for care homes.

We’ve always been excited about digital innovation and were fortunate to work with some incredibly smart people from NIHR, UCL, UCLPartners and LivingWith to support the rollout of an app across NEL Trusts to help people living with COVID and their clinicians, address and manage their condition. Particularly gratifying was to have been part of bringing a network of AHPs together to share experiences of developing Long Covid pathways and encourage a forum for learning and ongoing collaboration. 

This year we have made great headway with our Workforce Development Programme, developing and testing learning and training, new roles and supporting local people into and through health and care careers. Supporting the NELHCP Careers Programme, we have grown its Health and Social Care Career Ambassador Network to over 160 volunteers and delivered careers talks and events to 292 students, within 6 schools and for 20 Job Coaches. And excitement builds for the January launch of our online social care work experience module that we are developing with BHR CEPN on Barts Health Healthcare Horizons work experience platform. 

Our four Apprentice Nurse Associates are on track to graduate next September. We’re really proud of their commitment to the programme, during this challenging year and thank you to Ajeesh who shared his story as to why this training has been so important to him. And thanks to a strong partnership with BHR CEPN, Unique Training Solutions and UCLPartners, we’ve been able to develop and test another new role within Care Homes – Enablement Champions. Care staff with increased skills capacity to support delivery of community rehabilitation and reablement services within care homes and improve partnership working between health and care, the first cohort of which have completed their training and are in post in a number of East London Care Homes.

We were also proud to collaborate with Barking and Dagenham College and Ufi VocTechTrust to launch eCare, an app for care workers and health and social care students to enhance their skills and knowledge in spotting the soft signs of deterioration and developing their confidence in sharing information with medical professionals. Currently in use by 320 care workers and students, we continue to share the technology to help develop care workers skills. 

A Healthy Living – Four Stories From The Future of Care launched this year sharing this work we’ve been doing, alongside many of you to support our care workers in developing new skills and confidence. A topic at UCLPartners Doing Things Differently webinar, we were delighted at the engagement it received and the discussion it started and our focus on continuing to develop workplace and workforce opportunities for social care continues into 2022.

For all those highlights, as for many teams, our favourite moments were the few when we could be together, in East London. It is tough to close our year with so many unwelcome flashbacks to a year ago. In truth, as much as we have been inspired by others’ resilience, we have been surprised by our own. We have never had a tougher year at Care City, and we have never felt more excited about our mission or more certain that we will be here next year and the year after. 

In September, we hope you will be with us, opening our new, permanent home in Barking. The wine may be warm and a little cheap, but the speeches will be short, and you will be surrounded by health and care colleagues changing their careers and lives of East Londoners for the better.

Very best wishes to you over this festive season. We look forward to our continued partnership in 2022.

The Care City Team