Enhanced Health in Care Homes (EHCH)

The NHS Plan promises to ‘upgrade NHS support to all care home residents who would benefit by 2023/24, with the EHCH model rolled out across the whole country.’

Older people living in care homes have not always been able to expect equal access to NHS services, despite the fact that care home residents are among the most likely to be living with complex health needs.

The EHCH programme was developed as part of the NHS Five Year Forward View to pilot new approaches to providing wrap-around services for residents.

These include:

• named general practice support
• timely access to emergency out of hours support
• access to regular clinical pharmacist-led medicine reviews
• support for care homes to share information relevant to residents’ care.

Evidence from the six EHCH ‘Vanguards’ suggests that this model can reduce A&E attendance and emergency admissions from care homes by around 25%.

Linked Practices

In our network, the following linking arrangments have been made between our GP practices and Care Homes within our network area: