Medicines Awareness Webinars for Care Staff (2025)

Care Homes Advice Pharmacy Service (CHAPS), NHS Northamptonshire ICB

Project summary

The Northamptonshire ICB Care Homes Advice Pharmacy Service (CHAPS) team is a county wide provision promoting medicines safety, risk awareness and best practice in care homes and community care.
Finding the same issues repeatedly across care services, from simple fixes such as fridge temperatures recorded inconsistently, to more complex concerns such as support for swallowing difficulties and the appropriateness of covert administration, the team wanted to find a way to effectively reach a wider audience on a regular basis.
There are over 240 care homes in Northamptonshire, varying from large, 120-person residential homes, to smaller homes looking after 4 adults with learning disabilities, and nursing homes for people with complex issues such as brain injury. There are also numerous domiciliary care agencies in the county, and their staff are also invited to join the webinars. There are often a lot of areas of medicines use in social care that are common to both settings. The webinars address issues that are specific to domiciliary care, for example, medicines storage in peoples’ homes, waste disposal and controlled drugs.
The webinars are live and fully interactive, with participants invited to join in and share their experiences. The team encourage and welcome contributions from care staff, as it can prompt useful and ‘real world’ conversations about best practice in medicines management. Whilst the CHAPS team have prepared slides that they go through for the webinar, there is always time for attendees to ask questions and share ideas.
The sessions are inclusive of staff in a quality role, for example ICB or council quality and safeguarding colleagues. They can join, ask questions and have points clarified. They regularly contact the team for advice following their care facility visits.
The sessions are not designed to replace traditional training and competencies; they are to support and enhance peoples’ knowledge and understanding of a topic, or to act as a refresher for more experienced staff. Guidance and accredited training courses are signposted, whether they are local in-person workshops or online courses run by national bodies.
With time being a concern for care management, each webinar is a maximum of 60 minutes and concentrates on a particular theme, for example medicines ordering and storage, time critical medicines and high-risk medicines. The sessions are at 11am, a time identified in the teams’ research as being the most convenient time to optimise attendance.
The 2024/25 series included ‘guest speakers’ – a dietitian from Northamptonshire Healthcare Foundation Trust (NHFT) who led a session on hydration in care homes as the warmer weather approached, and the ICB Medicines Governance Lead presented a session on antibiotic stewardship.
Scheduled 2025/26 sessions include a session from a continence nurse on catheter care top tips, as well as return spots from the dietitian, and from the ICB Medicines Governance Lead to speak on anti-viral medication as we move towards the Autumn flu season.
To date, there have been 12 webinars, with a total of over 450+ attendees.