What should care diversification look like?
There’s no “one way” of how to diversify a care business. Each organisation has its own circumstances, its own duties of care to provide.
To understand where care can go when a service is diversified, you need to know what sort of care work is being provided currently. Below is a short list of the types of care services currently available in the UK:
- Domiciliary Care (home visits)
- Residential Care (care home, nursing home)
- Independent or Assisted Living
- Childcare & Early Years
- Day Care
- Child Protection
- Community Care
- Occupational Therapy
- Counselling
- Advice and Guidance
- Youth or Community Work
As you can see from this list, there are areas of crossover, and this is where a firm doing one type of care might extend into another or multiple others. A domiciliary care service could certainly handle extending into assisted living, for example. Youth and Community Work can nicely dovetail with advice and guidance services.
The most popular care diversification is that of assisting respite care. Private clients, typically family, are more and more often looking for support to help with either an elderly relative or to provide young care – quite often for a child with a disability.
The opportunity to expand into this area of care is probably best pursued by those handling residential care and childcare, but so long as qualified personnel are involved and due diligence has been done, any care provider could realistically expand into respite care. The key is to make sure your provision is high quality, and to reassure clients of this through transparency and visibility; include these people in the process of things like care plans, scheduling, and what the service entails.
Technology in Care
The best way to ensure you can provide high quality and transparency to clients and their families is to utilise care technology to support your carers. At The Access Group, we have a wide-ranging suite of solutions that can manage the day-to-day administration and client management, so that carers can focus on the care rather than the paperwork, but still have all the information they need at their fingertips as and when it matters.
Technology Enabled Care (TEC)
Our Technology Enabled Care solution is a combination of traditional reactive alarms and monitors with modern computing, in a way that can generate insights based on the data recorded and build up patterns.
We can put TEC into an individual’s home 6-18 months prior to when a person might develop increased care needs. This allows our hardware and software alike to generate data and to provide context for the future to support their needs. Issues such as dehydration, a lack of mobility, falls… all can be observed and relayed to clinicians or carers. This helps with preparation – things like bed allocation and staffing – to meet the needs of the individual and to support/prolong independence.
Through these patterns, carers and clinicians alike can be proactive and spot problems before they become serious, thus preventing further hardship for the patient but also limiting the impact on the healthcare system as a whole.
For local authorities it means improved care quality and safety, and for the provider it means better service delivery. This is achieved by giving carers the tools they need to excel, and can benefit the families or loved ones of a client by allowing greater coordination between all parties.
Care Compliance
Access Care Compliance (ACC) is a comprehensive governance tool in care. As the name suggests, the software helps your care services stay compliant with the law and other industry regulations and standards, as well as making audits more systematic and easy to facilitate.
For customers in England, we offer a mock inspection tool aligned to the Care Quality Commission’s new inspection framework, but for all customers we help you manage, track and improve both your care quality and care rating across all services.
By presenting the client information the way we do, everything is in one place. You can manage, track and collate all actions from one central record, ensuring accuracy. Action plans are sharable and collaborative, and there are timelines and prompts to support actions needed.
ACC is suitable for all care, whether domiciliary, residential, or assisted/supported living. It is scalable and configurable to organisations of any size, and all of the above means greater flexibility for the client, their families, carers, the local authorities, and inspectors.
Learning for Care
Access Learning for Care is a learning management system designed to facilitate all your learning and development needs: eLearning, classroom training, and self-directed learning. We provide more than 70 courses to build skills, as well as offering virtual eCompetency modules to help assess staff readiness and develop greater hazard perception.
This ties in with the reassurance of customers/families but also the cultivation of a good working culture; staff should be regularly undertaking learning activities. This not only keeps their duties and responsibilities fresh in their mind, but also helps develop other aspects of their care work they may be new to or where regulations may have changed.
Our learning management system allows you to coordinate learning, manage appraisals, and track compliance. We have a mobile app for access on the go, designed so that it’s a quick and easy experience a user can dip in and out of.
The course materials are created in conjunction with subject-matter experts from within the care sector, so that the learning pathways are beneficial and relevant to good care provision. For extra flair though we have our own eCreator; an eLearning authoring tool that enables you to create your own eLearning courses. You can go bespoke and add your own videos or documents to the LMS and create custom development plans for your care business needs.
Care Planning
Access Care Planning (ACP) handles the management side of care delivery – whether domiciliary, residential, or assisted living. It is made for planning and organising care, and built around a person-centred care plan and a holistic digital care record – by which we mean one that is centralised and all-encompassing.
The goal is to help our customers deliver high-quality, safe and personalised care, and with ACP we can deliver faster – and smarter – care assessments, with bespoke forms to fit your organisation if necessary.
With our Care Planning solution you can monitor real-time care delivery, see the full client record, and see every medication administered with eMAR; reliable and robust oversight to ensure great care and responsible care delivery. ACP also integrates with our Technology Enabled Care home hub, providing even greater context through daily living activities.
All of this is rounded out with a mobile app for family and funders, so they can see the care plans, care visits, and other important information. This in turn is a reassurance of due diligence, care goals, and updates on the client about their condition.
Importance of diversification in business
Businesses diversify for two main reasons – survival or growth. Like a financial portfolio, diversifying avoids having all your eggs in one basket, reducing potential over-reliance and volatility in one market. It can provide greater business security and safeguard the long-term viability of the organisation as well as accelerate growth in new services or geographic areas.
The risk is that the sector of care your organisation is in sees changes that impact your service. These could be things like legislative changes from national or local government, financial issues, staff recruitment difficulties, or even the introduction of a rival company offering a similar service.
By expanding your horizons to provide additional care services, your organisation becomes multi-faceted and spreads that risk. The chances of suffering an impact to the business’ sustainability reduces with each new branch of the business, because that’s how probability works. There’s always a degree of probability that trouble arises, but across multiple services? That’s a slim chance indeed.
That’s not to say there’s no risk in expansion, and certainly there are lessons to be learned about delivering new types of care, but that’s the challenge of business management: on paper it’s risk averse to stay providing a good but modest care service, but is that not itself a risk, to stand still? If your care business goes under then you can’t provide for anyone, but if you strive to do more you can. You can grow, be more profitable, and provide more high quality care.
