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"Not one of us will ever forget that day" says Janice Howarth, team manager of Blackpool Council's Primary Night Care Service. The day she's talking about is 15 December when her team left London's Park Lane Hilton as winners of the older people's category at the Community Care Awards.

The Primary Night Care Service opened in October 2003 with a staff of just six. Its aim was to provide night time pop-in visits of around half an hour for both planned and emergency cover providing a range of personal and practical care tasks. It also wanted to forge closer links with other professionals such as social workers, district nurses, paramedics and the primary care trust professionals.

It succeeded on both fronts and, just over two years on, the number of staff working on the project has more than doubled to 14.

"On any night there are two pairs of staff on duty together with a back up worker and they are delivering planned care from referrals from social workers and responding to emergency calls from paramedics, district nurses and GPs," Howarth says. "We want to help people live as independently as is possible and to avoid the need for people to be admitted to hospital," she adds.

Service users are enthusiastic about the project. "We have had quite a few people tell us that if it weren't for the Night Care Service they would have had to go in to a home," she says. It has also been well received by district nurses and paramedics who say that it has enabled them to concentrate on dealing with medical problems.

The team is also able to offer a lifeline to carers. "We have one disabled young man whose carer is his mum. She was finding she was on call 24 hours a day and we have been able to go in to look after him, which means she can get a full night's sleep," Howarth says.

"We are looking to see if we can get some extra funding from health to develop a team of six workers to work with the district nurse and a social care worker to work towards integrated working to provide a seamless service."

Howarth says the staff are the key to the project's success. "Our staff are brilliant and are committed to the service."

The awards ceremony, she says, was: "absolutely wonderful. We had never done anything like this before and didn't know what to expect - we were so proud just to have been shortlisted.

"When it was announced that we had won, to be honest I was shellshocked - although absolutely ecstatic as well. You believe in your services, but I hadn't expected to win in the face of such stiff competition," she says.
A party is planned soon to officially thank all the staff and to celebrate their success. Looking to the future, the team has used some of the awards money to buy a mobile hoist, and will probably buy more equipment if the service expands, as Howarth hopes it will.

"Most nights we are responding to some sort of emergency, so there is a real need for this service to be developed. I would like to see this sort of service on offer in all social services departments," she says.  Sentiments that were echoed by one of the award judges who said: "This sort of service should be available everywhere - especially in my home town!"