Somerset Care is a not-for-profit provider running nursing, residential and dementia care across the south of England. They have started a Clinical Leadership Community of Practice across our six nursing homes. 

On Thursday 20 August the clinical managers from the Somerset Care Group nursing homes spent a full day together at Lavender Court for the first meeting.

Irina Butnaru hosted and Wanita Munemo, Group Clinical Practice Lead for Nursing Services, chaired the session. Thet were joined by Trudy Craig, Head of Quality and Governance, and Cheryl Baird, Professional Clinical Adviser. By the end of the day it was clear something new had started.

One network instead of six islands
Clinical managers tend to spend their working lives inside one building, carrying the clinical questions for that building and often working them out alone. The Community changes that. When one home finds something that works, the other five hear about it within the month rather than a year later or never. When one of our leaders is facing a difficult clinical question, experienced peers who have almost certainly faced it too are now within reach.

The day was built around conversation rather than slides. Each manager talked about their own home in their own words, including things that had not gone well, which takes real trust on the first day of a new group. The room worked through the themes that are live for nursing right now, medication safety and syringe driver practice, end of life and palliative care, skin integrity and tissue viability and the leadership side of nursing. Trudy took the group through policy development and Radar changes. Cheryl spoke on clinical training, competencies and the NMC sessions being planned.

Part of one quality agenda
None of this stands apart from the wider quality work. It is how that work reaches the front line. The Community is now the room where our clinical leaders test policies against real practice, where learning from events is shared across six homes at once instead of staying in one, and where the themes and risks that matter are surfaced openly. The assurance that reaches our Chief Operating Officer and Head of Quality reflects what is genuinely happening on the floor.

Specialist expertise the whole organisation can call on
One of the day’s decisions was that each home is taking on a specialist clinical area, in fields such as end of life care, tissue viability and wound management, infection prevention, enteral and PEG feeding, medication, Parkinson’s and falls. Rather than every home trying to be equally good at everything, each will build deep, recognised expertise in its area and lend it to the others.

The reach goes beyond the six nursing homes. Across our residential homes, our community services and our learning disability service, colleagues support people with real clinical needs every day and getting timely clinical advice has not always been easy. As these specialisms mature, any part of the organisation will know where to turn. A residential home worried about a deteriorating wound, a
community colleague with an end of life question, each will have a named team that holds that expertise and wants to share it.

Empowering our nurses to specialise and grow
For our nurses this is a genuine development opportunity. Specialising is one of the things nurses tell us they miss when they move into social care and we are building it here. A nurse at any of our homes will be able to develop real depth in their home’s specialist area, teach it to peers across the organisation and be known for it, without leaving social care to do so. That matters for the nurses we have and for the ones we have not met yet. If we want younger people to see social care as
somewhere to build an ambitious nursing career, we have to show them a path. A network of specialist practice, peer teaching and visible clinical leadership is exactly that.

Growing our own through nursing apprenticeships
The group also spent time on nursing apprenticeships. Nursing students arrive with the most current knowledge in the profession and our experienced nurses hold something no classroom can give, years of clinical judgement and the craft of caring for people well. Bring the two together and both sides grow. The student gains mentorship and a real clinical home, our nurses gain the stretch of teaching and a fresh line to current practice, and we gain a pipeline of nurses who have grown up in
our values.

Writing our Nursing Vision and strategy for 2027 to 2029
The last part of the day began our Nursing Vision and nursing strategy for 2027 to 2029. The managers wrote down, in their own words, what excellent nursing at Somerset Care looks like, for the people we care for, for the nurses who deliver it and for the organisation we want to be known as. Those words are now being drafted into a vision that will go back to the group to challenge and refine. A strategy usually starts in a boardroom and travels down. This one started in the room with the people who lead nursing every day.

What the room said afterwards
The feedback was clear. People found it refreshing. They said it reminded them why they came into nursing in the first place and they felt privileged to be part of the group shaping where nursing at Somerset Care goes next. Clinical leadership is a demanding job and it is rare to get both the time and the right company to think about practice properly instead of firefighting it.

What happens next
The Community meets every month, in person, moving around the six homes. The themes, risks and improvement work that come out of it are reported each month to our Chief Operating Officer and Head of Quality and feed into the Quality Committee, so what is discussed in that room travels.

By Wanita Munemo, Group Clinical Practice Lead (Nursing Services), Somerset Care