FEATURE Embracing Technology
Paul Djuric, Operations Manager at Urgent Technology, explains how those working in the care sector can safeguard physical, virtual and social infrastructures in an advancing world.
Our physical environment has a direct bearing on our mood and behaviour. It can also massively impact on health and wellbeing. Too cold or too hot, and we’re uncomfortable. Too noisy or too bright, and we can’t relax. This is why we spend time and effort maintaining our homes, ensuring they’re safe and comfortable. And when we have guests, many of us want our homes to reflect just how much we care about them and their visit. When we’re responsible for looking aſter the wellbeing of others, we need to provide environments that are not only fit for purpose, but also pleasant, relaxed, and secure places to be.
Every property needs to be maintained, but when you offer a home to the vulnerable, a haven of sorts, you have to go a step beyond the traditional parameters of maintenance. Compliance is essential in the care sector; simply because you’re responsible for people’s lives. The health and wellbeing of these individuals hinges on the level of care that’s being offered, but also on the physical infrastructures in place. Care home managers must make sure the environment matches expectations and caters to the needs of the residents; and a big part of this involves maintaining the fabric of the building.
A well-maintained facility is vital in the care sector, but this isn’t just to improve residents’ experience; there’s a business case for maintenance too. If ineffectively maintained, the cost of equipment breakdown can far outweigh the initial investment and negatively impact business operations and profitability. By implementing a planned and preventative maintenance strategy, care home managers can make more informed decisions about their assets, avoiding unnecessary risk while improving reliability. This can help protect a business’s reputation.
Minimising disruption doesn’t just save care homes money, it can also help
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to reduce upset and distress. When you’re dealing with people’s lives, you need to ensure you have planned maintenance in place; there’s no room for complacency. You can’t just cross your fingers and hope that everything will work as planned – it rarely does. A proactive, tech-assisted maintenance plan can free up managers’ time because the information they need is presented to them in an instant, instead of buried in torrents of paperwork. Less time searching for documentation aſter an issue has been raised gives them more time to focus on providing the very best standards of care.
“Every property needs to be maintained, but when you offer a home to the
vulnerable, a haven of sorts, you have to go a step beyond the traditional parameters of maintenance.”
There are many ways and means to improve maintenance management. Firstly, it’s important to have systems to record compliance. That way, you’re protected should an incident happen. On that note, think about moving away from a paper-based record system, because paperwork is open to damage and loss. It’s far better and safer to store the compliance data online.
Most care homes engage with maintenance contractors. If you’re one of them, it might be an idea to monitor these service providers to ensure the SLAs agreed at the outset of the relationship are being honoured. For instance, what’s the difference between how quickly you expect repairs to be made and the actual time
it takes? Collecting the relevant data can improve contractor management, ensuring both parties get the best out of the working relationship.
Tracking fixed assets can give care home managers insight into why a particular piece of equipment needs frequent maintenance, which may prompt the question as to whether there’s a more cost effective, reliable alternative. Managing assets in this way means you can conduct trend analysis, which will reveal if there is a troublesome asset that needs to be replaced with a different model or manufacturer, or whether there’s an underlying reason for the malfunction, such as misuse.
Various technology on the market can help with these pursuits. There are energy tracking devices available which can help businesses understand whether they’re using energy efficiently. Care homes need to be kept warm for much of the year, however there may be ways to reduce the associated cost of heating. Those options will only become apparent when the relevant data is presented. There’s also much talk about the Internet of Things (IoT). This basically refers to the technological and virtual infrastructures that together measure and present information on environmental factors such as air quality, temperature and sound levels. Then there’s predictive maintenance; technology that monitors the performance of assets, such as a boiler, and which can determine the most appropriate time for maintenance intervention.
An all-encompassing tool is computer- aided facilities management (CAFM) soſtware, which presents real-time data maintenance data in easily digestible ways. A good CAFM system should be easy to navigate and the data should be easy to understand for all stakeholders – whether you’re the care home manager or the property
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