How far could the Universal Care Plan go in transforming care?
The Universal Care Plan (UCP) is already enabling joined-up, person-centred care across settings, ensuring that people’s needs, preferences, and goals are understood and respected by all involved in their care. It plays a crucial role in the care of individuals living with dementia, frailty, sickle cell disease, learning disabilities, complex needs and those approaching the end of life.
Looking ahead, there is huge potential to leverage the UCP’s technology. One area of opportunity is in the development of assessments, such as the comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA). CGAs are becoming a cornerstone in managing long-term conditions for older people, and helping them maintain independence. The UCP is in the early stages of prototyping a CGA, which could exchange data directly with the care plan, reducing duplicate data entry.
There is scope to tailor the UCP for more disease-specific pathways—such as epilepsy, renal conditions or diabetes.
This would allow specialist teams to capture and share care plans to manage specific situations or symptoms, supporting both prevention and crisis management. As demonstrated with sickle cell pain management, these specific protocols can be embedded within the UCP, ensuring people are cared for holistically and their condition management is not isolated.
Patients already have full visibility of their care plans through the NHS App, and in the near future they will be able to contribute to information within their plan, such as ‘what matters to me’. We are excited to be the first fully co-created care plan system in the country. But how far could the UCP really go? Could the UCP allow patients to track symptoms? Could the UCP be used to support population health management by flagging high risk patients? Could Artificial Intelligence be used to summarise key information for different users, or allow patients to create their own goals?
Lucy Williams, Transformation Manager Universal Care Plan Programme
Care home spotlight
March saw the highest care home utilisation of the UCP since its launch, building on the record-breaking engagement we saw in February.
South West London’s Digital Implementation team shared the fantastic work they’ve been doing to help care homes adopt digital tools, including the UCP. Currently, 45% of SWL care homes have access to the UCP and this has contributed to a 9% reduction in the number of residents taken to hospital by ambulance among the care homes using the system. Read more, including insights from care home staff on how the UCP is benefitting both their staff and residents, and explore our care home resources here.
We also had the pleasure of attending Havering’s care home conference. It was a fantastic opportunity to connect with so many dedicated care home staff – thank you to everyone who stopped by to chat with us!
Share your thoughts on the UCP Worklists functionality
We are currently evaluating our worklists feature available on the UCP web portal and would really value your input!
We would really appreciate you taking 5-10 minutes to complete a short survey about your experience.
Your feedback will help shape the next version of Worklists, helping to ensure it better aligns with your needs and continues to support effective care planning.
Please click here to complete the survey. All responses will be anonymised prior to analysis.
UCP Monthly Report
In March, we achieved a new milestone – over 5000 care plans created in a single month for the first time since the UCP launched!
A big thank you to everyone who contributed. It’s fantastic to see continued growth in utilisation, helping us move closer to our goal of ensuring everyone in London who needs one, has a UCP.
Dates for the Diary
Thursday 15th May 11am -12pm – Join Skills for Care, the UCP team and the Health Innovation Network South London for a free webinar designed for care homes and domiciliary care services to discover new ways their service can be supported to use digital innovations and help achieve best practice to benefit staff and people they support. Sign up here.
Dying matters week: events featuring the UCP
This week marks Dying Matters week, a national campaign to encourage conversations around death, dying and bereavement. Our champions from South East London Palliative and End of Life Care Programme are hosting 2 events that will highlight the UCP.
- Lunch and learn webinar for palliative care and dementia. Click here to find out more and register.
- YODO (You only die once) cafes. Click here for more details.