What is reablement?
A reablement service is a type of short-term, goal-oriented support intervention provided to individuals who may have experienced a decline in their ability to perform their daily activities due to illness, injury, or other factors.
Reablement services aim to help individuals regain some parts if not their full independence to allow them to remain living independently without the reliance of health and social care professionals.
Typically this type of intervention involves a team of healthcare professionals who work with the individual to develop specific goals that matter to them to improve their daily living skills, mobility, and overall wellbeing.
This approach tends to be used as an alternative to longer-term care to promote self-sufficiency and reduce the need for ongoing assistance.
What are community reablement services?
Like reablement services, community reablement services aim to help increase an individual’s independence. However, these interventions are delivered within a person’s community or home environment.
These services are designed to support individuals who need assistance in regaining their independence to live their day-to-day lives.
Like reablement services in general, community reablement services can be delivered by a large team of health and social care professionals including occupational therapists, physiotherapists, social workers, and home care aides.
For community reablement services to be successful it has to include 5 key parts:
- Ensure all care and support provided is person-centred to meet every individual need
- All care and support provided must be home-based to encourage familiarity and comfort
- All community reablement services must be provided on a short-term basis to help an individual regain their independence as safely and quickly as possible
- All care and support delivered must be outcomes-focused in collaboration with the individual so all independent living goals can be achieved
- It must be a holistic approach that involves a multidisciplinary team to address the various aspects of an individual’s wellbeing including both physical and mental
In general, the overarching aim for both reablement and community reablement services is to empower individuals to become as self-sufficient as possible after illness or injury to reduce their reliance on ongoing care and support services and prevent readmissions into hospitals to ultimately improve their quality of life.
How do community reablement services work?
For community reablement services to be successful your local authority must be proactive in deciding which individuals would best suit the service to make working in conjunction with wider health and social care services more successful. This is because the whole team can share the same ethnos and be aware of each individual’s goals to co-produce support to help them achieve that.
In the last year alone, over 1,700 people were given re-abling support and over 70% of people who received the care were able to take care of themselves again with an additional 17% seeing a reduction in the support needed at home.
When implemented correctly, therefore, community reablement can be very successful for both the individual and the local authority. The Social Care Institute for Excellence explains some key features that must be followed, some of these features include:
- Focusing on a person’s strengths to promote and maximise independence and wellbeing
- Rebuild confidence
- Provide support that encourages the individual to do things instead of the carer doing it for them
- Support people to regain skills to enable them to manage tasks with either complete control or little support
- Aim to reconnect people with their communities to reduce social isolation
- Aim to reduce the amount of care unpaid carers and family members need to deliver to their loved ones
For community reablement services to be successful, local authorities must follow the same basic steps to ensure the approach is followed correctly to get the best outcomes, typically the process is undertaken in five stages:
1. The Assessment
The first stage of community reablement services is arranging and conducting an assessment by a healthcare professional who will decide how beneficial a reablement service will be for the individual. During the assessment factors such as the patient’s mobility, and stamina will be considered to decide if the service will work for them.
2. First Visits
Once the assessment has taken place and it has been agreed that reablement services will be appropriate for the individual the first few visits can take place. These initial visits are much more frequent and hands-on, but gradually throughout the visits health and social care professionals take a bigger step back to allow the individual to be more independent. Once the individual is more stable health and social care professionals will only get involved if they think it is necessary to do so.
3. Continuous Evaluation
During community reablement services, reablement staff will continue to assess the progress an individual is making. Through continuously evaluating their progress, support plans can be altered and changed as well as knowing when it is best to terminate a program when it no longer is benefitting the individual. During this stage, everything is communicated clearly including any decisions about changing care plans so the individual can fully understand the progress they are making.
4. Home Assessment
As the reablement service comes closer to the end, one of the final stages the reablement staff will undergo is assessing the individual’s home. This is to help ensure that the home is suitable once they reach the end of their reablement program to prevent future care needs and hospital admissions.
Many people often find reablement staff offers simple but effective housing adjustments to make daily living easier. Some examples include handlebars, ramps, higher-level seating, bed levers, and adjusted toilet seating.
5. Aftercare
One of the final main stages which take place in community reablement services is planning the aftercare. This final stage allows a detailed plan to be created and adapted regularly to ensure anyone involved in the caregiving knows what is happening next once the program is complete and what to do if any needs change.
Why are community reablement services important?
As discussed above the main benefit of community reablement services, when they are delivered correctly is that they allow individuals to regain and increase their independence so they can remain living within their own homes without the dependency on social care services or residential homes.
This reduced dependency and reliance on ongoing care helps to improve quality of life and also helps manage demand better lowering the cost and burden on these services, as well as establishing a better work-life balance for health and social care professionals.
Individuals can also have future care needs delayed by having all the tools and equipment needed by the end of their reablement program to best support themselves and increase their confidence as well as both their physical and mental wellbeing.
There are many other benefits of community reablement services for the individual and their families, as well as health and social care professionals, and the community overall. Below is a table explaining those key benefits.
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Individuals and their families |
Health and Social Care Professionals |
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Benefits of Community Reablement Services |
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How can technology help support community reablement services?
Like health and social care in general digitally transforming how care and support are arranged, assessed, and delivered opens up a lot more opportunities to consistently improve outcomes within your local authority, and digitally transforming community reablement services is no different.
Ultimately investing in technology for your community reablement services makes adapting and improving your services even easier and more time efficient. Reablement staff teams can be notified in real-time of any changes in activity before something critical happens to deliver more timely support. Equally through offering better digital insights more data-led decisions can be made to improve the quality of care further.
Technology therefore can offer a more efficient and personalised approach to care to improve confidence, increase independence, prevent future care needs, and improve quality of life.
Below are just some of the examples of how technology can improve your community reablement services:
1. Enable better data-led decisions
One of the biggest ways technology can help improve community reablement services is through enabling better data-led decision-making. This can be in both future planning with demand modelling technology as well as providing better day-to-day preventative care through providing actionable insight so more timely support can be provided in real-time.
Undoubtedly, one of the biggest benefits of digitally transforming community reablement services is by establishing electronic patient records (EPR). Here all health and social professionals within a reablement program can access the information needed all in one centralised place. Access RioCloud allows organisations with 10 to 10,000 users to be able to access our marketing-leading EPR system to inform healthcare practitioners and put clinical needs first to improve decision-making and provide the best possible care to enable individuals to reach their independent living goals.
Using wearables, for example, is a great way to enhance independence whilst being discreet so their care circle can be updated in real-time of any changes in daily activity to assess progress and ensure safety. This, in turn, provides the individual and their loved ones reassurance that whilst they are regaining their independence, support will always be there if it is ever needed.
Equally through using technology reablement staff can share data and information more effectively. Carers can access the information they need whenever and wherever they are to change plans and rotas accordingly when there is sickness and emergencies.
East Sussex Rehabilitation Service found through using Access CM and our mobile app, support workers were able to input information even when they were offline with full confidence it would automatically update when internet connections were restored. Having all individual files located in one place means everyone involved in the reablement program can have better visibility of the care delivery and adjust improvements when needed.
2. Offer more opportunities
Another benefit of investing technology into reablement services is it offers more opportunities to individuals to increase independence but also prevent their care needs from deteriorating.
One way it offers more opportunities is through improving accessibility to local health and social care services. Investing in technology can promote the use of telehealth services. This is beneficial to individuals using reablement services as it enables more virtual consultations to take place and helps ensure individuals get the clinical as well as the social support they need. This, in turn, can eliminate the stress of arranging transport for individuals to commute to in-person visits, especially those with mobility issues, to make accessing support even easier.
Equally through investing in assistive technology such as smart home devices, mobility aids, and different communication tools, individuals can build a stronger support network around them, so they can remain independent but have support whenever they need it to allow their reablement goals to be achieved quicker.
One of the most exciting opportunities for individuals when community reablement programs are digitally transformed is it can help to reduce discharge delays by offering patients the chance to be transferred to a virtual ward. Virtual wards offer individuals the opportunity to continue to be looked after within the comforts of their own homes and allow medically fit patients to be discharged from hospitals sooner. Here data can flow into existing systems across the care continuum helping reablement staff teams to use dashboards effectively and have the confidence that patients can be treated safely at home to help them back on their feet and avoid readmissions.
There are many ways digitally transforming community reablement services can improve the service and allow individuals to reach their goals sooner. Investing in technology enabled care in particular provides efficient tools for assessing and adjusting reablement support plans to promote independence, safety, and wellbeing for individuals using the service.
At Access Technology enabled care we combine both reactive alarm functionality and digital insight to provide better proactive care which puts the individual first whilst providing reassurance to loved ones that support will be there whenever it is needed.
Our variety of sensors, wearables, and our home hub, are discreet and unobtrusive to allow individuals to live their daily lives confidently without feeling they are being watched.
Best ways to use community reablement services
In this article I have reviewed what reablement services are and the difference between reablement and community reablement services to explain why they are important for the individual, their loved ones, health and social care professionals, and the community as a whole.
Through establishing and delivering proactive community reablement services as well as increasing independence, the dependency on long-term care facilities such as care homes can be reduced. Community reablement services can also help improve and reduce workloads for health and social care professionals to reduce burnout, provide cost-savings to make budgets stretch further, as well as prevent future care needs and hospital readmissions.
This article has also explained how through digitally transforming community reablement services, individuals can be accessible to more opportunities to reach their reablement goals even quicker and have a better quality of life.
I have explained how technology-enabled care in particular allows individuals to get the support they need when they need it more discreetly so they don’t feel like they are being watched.
To find out more about the extra opportunities individuals can be given when using Access TEC in their reablement services find out more today.
Contact us and see first-hand how Access TEC can help improve quality of life, increase independence, and improve the overall physical and mental wellbeing of the residents in your local authority today.