The Care Campaign
The Care campaign is a joint drive by the Patients Association and Nursing Standard magazine to improve fundamental patient care across the UK.
CARE stands for:
C – communicate with compassion
A – assist with toileting, ensuring dignity
R – relieve pain effectively
E – encourage adequate nutrition
The campaign recognises that everyone who goes into a care setting is entitled to these four fundamental aspects of care – they are a human right.
We hope patients, relatives and nurses will use this Care slogan as a care checklist. Patients and relatives can use it to pinpoint shortcomings in care; nurses can use it to articulate a case to their managers for more support, for example, more staff.
The Care campaign asks all nurses, nursing directors, chief executives and non-executive directors of NHS trusts to sign up to the Care Challenge so that ‘Care’ becomes a universal expectation for patients.
The campaign’s aims are:
- For nursing staff to adopt the Care Challenge, based on our four-point tool.
- To highlight obstacles nurses face in delivering the Care Challenge.
- For organisations to sign up to the Care Challenge.
- For patients to recognise the Care checklist and to use it to challenge poor care.
- To support nurses who expose failures to deliver the fundamentals of care.
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Some thoughts:
What is crucial of course is what the above C. A. R. E. depends upon - and this has been considered within the campaign:
C: Attitude, self-awareness, professionalism and training in theory and practice.
A: Time and adequate staff assignment to enable patient - person-centred care not task allocation.
R: Time to observe and interact with patients and relatives - acknowledging patient reports and training in the recognition of pain and management. Pain management should not be incidental - neither should dignity and respect.
E: Too posh to wash - Too senior to help feed a patient, ensure they have a drink?