“The UCP is a gamechanger for improved care – particularly in care homes.”
In our latest Meet Team OneLondon feature we are delighted to introduce Yomi Ogunsola who is Care Home Quality Liaison Nurse at South East London Integrated Care Board (Bromley) and a Universal Care Plan (UCP) Champion. Yomi talks about his work supporting care home staff to use the UCP for the benefit of their residents (28 August 2025).
What’s your background?
I am a Registered Nurse, Registered District Nurse and a nurse prescriber. I have clinical experience in acute care, A&E, elderly and community nursing care. I also have qualification and experience in infection prevention and control.
I was a Clinical Nurse Manager and of late a Divisional Manager for Community Nursing Services.
What’s your involvement with the UCP?
Currently I am the Interim Care Home Quality Liaison Nurse at South East London ICB (Bromley), on a fixed-term post covering a sabbatical. I work with the 46 CQC registered care homes and 5 Extra Care Housing (ECH) schemes in the London Borough of Bromley. A big part of my role is promoting digital systems and applications such as the Universal Care Plan and London Care Record which can support them to provide the very best care for their residents.
I am also part of the UCP Champion Network. We are a group of around 100 people working across London trying to encourage more health and care staff to use the UCP to help ensure more Londoners benefit from the joined-up care it supports. The Network is great at sharing ideas and the UCP Team provides us with a lot of useful material to support our work.
How many care homes in Bromley were using the UCP?
When I started my role in September 2024, I was tasked with building on the great work of the permanent Liaison Nurse. At the time, 14 care homes in Bromley were using the UCP; my target was to get 85% of them using the system within the year.
For me the UCP is a gamechanger. It is an innovation that supports quality care. I needed to understand what was preventing care homes from onboarding and why usage was low for some of the homes who were on the system. I then needed to come up with practical ways to help.
Through visiting care homes, I found many staff saw the UCP as just another digital tool on top of all the other systems they already use. They also thought the plan would be blank and they would have to start entering information about their residents from scratch. So rather than something that could support them, many saw the UCP as a burden.
How did you improve usage of the UCP?
I spent a lot of time building relations with the care home managers and staff. Key to this was accompanying the Provider Relations Team at Bromley Council to QAF (Quality Assessment Framework) monitoring visits to non-onboarded homes in particular, to get a deeper insight into what is happening at the care home. Through this I got to know them better and was able to let them know I was there to support them to improve quality and be CQC ready. The UCP is a highly recommended digital platform by the ICB. Soon they started calling me for help when they realised it may be part of their QAF review.
I helped many of them sign up for access, get started and running with the system. I often said, ‘you really need to test it out and if you get stuck anywhere let me know and I will come running’. I sat with many of them several times as they accessed it for the first time, encouraging them to look for care plans for their residents with the most complex needs.
When they found their resident and saw that many of them already contained important and practical information, they would say things like ‘goodness me, we should have done this before’ or ‘we’ve been missing out not using the system before’. They then told their colleagues, and it grew from there.
My response was always ‘better late than never, now be a champion user’ and I encouraged them to speak about the benefits of the system at my clinical network meeting, through numerous email communications and at care home forums. My aim is for all the care homes to use UCP even more and each to have a poster saying ‘we are champion users’.
Why is this work important to you?
I am really motivated by being able to make a difference in my role. With my nurse manager and clinical background, I cherish the opportunity to collaborate on a platform that helps to coordinate care and prevent telling a story multiple times. I would not be doing justice in my role if I did not convince care homes that UCP is the gamechanger and the best thing that could happen to them in terms of giving them the information they need about residents, while saving them time and sharing pertinent information of residents on need-to-know basis with other health care providers.
That is why I am proud that as of today I only have 4 out of 51 care settings left to be onboarded to UCP. While I had a target of 85%, I am now at 92% but aiming for 98% (if not 100%) by the end of my year in post.
It is an honour and privilege to be a UCP Champion. In my opinion, no one regrets using the UCP. It is a gamechanger for improved care – particularly in care homes.
The UCP Champions group help raise awareness of the UCP. The group is open to anyone employed in health and social care in London. If you would like to be part of the group, please contact ucp.programme@swlondon.nhs.uk