Our videos for care home staff reach two million views

A suite of videos produced to help carers and clinicians recognise when someone may be unwell has now been watched over two million times – and counting!

In 2019, NHS England (formerly Health Education England) commissioned Health Innovation Wessex and Health Innovation West of England to develop an online library of videos and e-learning materials. 

This supported the NHS Patient Safety Strategy and the Managing Deterioration Safety Improvement Programme, supported by the Patient Safety Collaboratives.

Initially it was intended that the resources should be for staff working in care homes to identify residents at risk of deterioration, but as part of the Covid response the videos were also made freely available on NHS England’s YouTube channel.

Identifying acute illness in any setting can be a challenge and opportunities to initiate appropriate care may be missed if illness is not recognised promptly. The series of co-produced short videos describe how to measure observations, including blood pressure, pulse rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturations, temperature and level of alertness, as well as the use of these to calculate NEWS2 (National Warning Score). 

The videos have proved extremely popular as there was little similar peer reviewed content available online, and the oxygen saturation video alone has had over 400,000 views.

The core set of videos was enhanced with additional videos to support care staff, highlighting the soft signs of deterioration, how to use tools such as SBARD (situation, background, assessment, recommendation and decision) to communicate concern, preventing infection and how to recognise deterioration in people with a learning disability. In 2021, the video library was developed to include content for carers with no clinical training and an additional set of videos launched.

Both sets of videos support the regional work undertaken by Health Innovation Wessex and Health Innovation West of England to support staff working in care homes to use the RESTORE2 and RESTORE2 mini tools. Read more about this work in our case study.

The videos can also be accessed via NHS England’s eLearning for Healthcare hub, an educational web-based platform that provides quality assured online training content for the UK’s health and care workforce.

The health innovation teams worked with Devon-based HCI to produce the videos. HCI has received innovator support from the health innovation networks to develop their business, which creates educational videos for patients on a wide range of conditions and treatment pathways.

Jo Murray, Associate Director Innovation Adoption - Strategic Programmes and Patient Safety Lead at Health Innovation Wessex said: “It is fantastic to see these videos supporting so many carers and clinicians - and the continued uptake of the RESTORE2 award-winning innovation developed in the Wessex region by West Hampshire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), which is now part of Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care Board (ICB)."

Alison Tavaré, GP and Primary Care Clinical Lead at Health Innovation West of England, said: “When we first discussed the possibility of using videos to help people take simple observations, we were sure that someone must have had the idea before us, but we were unable to find any brief and freely available videos so decided it was worth a try. Two million views later we think the team got it right!”

Find out more about the Wessex Patient Safety Collaborative.