First and foremost, you need to identify the key areas that would benefit from a digital system. Consider the most time-consuming tasks you and your staff must carry out day to day and find a software solution to both speed up that task and reduce errors.
Medicines
For example, MAR sheets are time consuming and can sometimes be filled out incorrectly or forgotten after a medication has been administered. The sheer number of medicines being given to multiple service users, means that these mistakes can be common. For this you would need to consider a system that hosts eMAR, taking your carers through a process when administering medication and only allowing completion once the carer has physically logged the medication administered.
In residential care, where greater responsibility is placed upon the operator for the management of medicines, you may need something more comprehensive, that covers stock control and can integrate with your pharmacies for example.
These Medication Management systems have proven to be very effective at reducing medicine errors, reducing waste and increasing efficiency, giving staff in the office and on the home’s floor more time to spend with residents, or to increase capacity and drive up quality.
Rostering
Another time-consuming task for a care provider is scheduling and rostering. In residential care there are regulatory and legal requirements for safe staffing levels. In domiciliary care there are additional challenges around ensuring carers have enough time to travel between visits, or where multiple carers may be needed in a single visit (commonly called ‘double-ups in the sector).
On top of having enough people to deliver care at the right time, shifts in care homes and visits in home care will often require specific skills, ranging from moving and handling and other care/nursing skills, through to languages spoken.
Even with a relatively small number of clients/residents, the number of moving parts and interactions will soon leave most providers pulling their hair out and creates a perfect breeding ground for errors, oversights and missed issues.
Scheduling/Rostering software (depending on the software you choose) will help you figure out most of your staffing needs automatically including skills, languages, client preferences etc. Again depending on how sophisticated the tool, you should be able to accurately manage and calculate other aspects of staff management (pay, billing clients, holiday and sickness management etc.)
Care planning, delivery, and management
Second only to rostering in their wide use across the sector, these systems take the paper-based processes associated with assessing clients, planning care, delivering, monitoring/modifying and reporting on that care. Their principal benefits lie in improving information flow across your organisation, while improving efficiency and safety for clients.
Often these systems will also have a mobile app, which carers use to understand exactly what care they need to deliver. This also gives the office a live view of care being delivered, the carer has up to the minute information on your clients and because there is one, synchronised record the stacks of admin and weekly hours of work associated with paper records are gone. Alerts for any incidents help prevent serious escalations.
In the early years of electronic care planning (c. 2013-2018) the market was swamped with as many as 20 different pieces of software, all slightly different, all claiming to be ‘complete.’ Care providers soon realised that in community services, in home care, electronic care planning really breaks down when your care planning and scheduling system are not integrated. Resulting in partnerships and acquisitions of software companies to bridge this gap.
Since those years, care planning software has been much improved, expanded and refined, leaving a handful of recognised providers in the market.
Governance, Auditing and Compliance Software
Possibly the newest type of care software, but one that always creates a lot of excitement when seen. These systems fix one of the most overlooked and impactful areas of running a service – auditing and quality improvement.
There are a relatively small number of providers of this software, all varying in what they can do. The most advanced is Access Care Compliance, giving providers the ability to mock inspect their services against the CQC’s Key Lines of Enquiry, get a predicted rating, see which areas they need to improve on and put trackable action plans in place.
This is exactly what the CQC demands from providers; know what is going on in your services, create plans to address shortcomings and have a solid evidence base to demonstrate actions and resulting improvements.
A secondary benefit of these systems is they make audits much more efficient and targeted at problem areas. Thirdly, area managers or managers of multiple services can see compliance levels across their services and drill down to try and identify causes.
eLearning
Sometimes training can fall to the back of the queue when delivering care. Therefore, implementing a system that manages training records and keeps you in line with current regulations is a great way to ease the burden that training brings. Often, courses are lengthy and can be costly.
When onboarding new staff, depending on experience level, training can take away valuable time from senior carers through demonstrating to the new starter on shift.
A digital system that can manage training records and legislation requirements, as well as being easy to use and flexible for your carers to complete could be the difference between clients receiving good care or poor care.
Access eLearning For You provides training for all areas of care, accessible 24/7 and available on a mobile app so that your staff can learn whenever and wherever they happen to be. With the option to set deadlines and notifications, you have full visibility on what training has been or needs to be completed, making sure your care organisation is always in line with regulatory standards with sufficiently trained staff.
Additionally, offering eCompetency which uses gamification to create a 3D virtual setting for your carers to identify hazards, assessing their ability to deliver care and therefore declaring them competent. eCompetency can be used as an alternative to completing courses again further down the line and they are proven to be competent at delivering care.
Additional function specific systems
There are other systems available for care providers, including on-demand pay to improve carer retention and utilisation (for example taking on more overtime) and screening software, for DBS checks and the like, to speed up carer on-boarding.
There are also recruitment, finance and HR software. Most small-mid care provider will not need extra finance, HR and other capabilities, as long as their care management software has the necessary parts of these tools included.