SAFEGUARDING
of resident care and the ability to cater properly for dietary and nutritional needs is suffering at the hands of obsolete practices.
Lack of time available to improve day to day quality of care is a clear issue for the sector. When asked what aspects of their working day they would spend more time on if they could reduce the amount of paperwork, more than half (56%) of care workers surveyed, say they would like to improve the standard of resident care if they had more time in their day. There is also a direct correlation between what worries care home staff day to day and the quality of care they are physically able to provide. Patchy reporting, outdated processes and a heavily reliance on manual updates, simply adds to the frustration and puts greater pressure on already stretched staff.
The care industry is a naturally paper-heavy world, and manual care plans, checklists, risk assessments and medical records are oſten large a difficult to access. For care workers, they need to be able to prove what action, if any, was taken at the time of an accident for instance. They need to be able to show who was informed and what measures were taken aſter the event to ensure the resident’s safety. If the correct data is gathered regularly when a future incident occurs, staff will
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begin to spot significant trends more easily and any analytical data can be evidenced at the point it is needed. Care homes can then use that information to embed into their best practice and demonstrate positive outcomes.
It’s clear that in many cases, the adoption of automated technology could help alleviate many of these day-to-day pressures and mitigate risks such as inaccurate or missing information, failure to monitor plan or using out of date information. The risk with paper-based systems is also that they can be added to in a disjointed or haphazard way, which can lead to an ineffective care planning process.
These kinds of outdated processes are essentially paralysing productivity in care homes and consequently, staff are spending more time firefighting admin rather than spending more time on the things that matter most. It’s no wonder that staff happiness and morale is suffering in this sector. Safeguarding in care homes is all about empowerment, prevention, protection and accountability, and having access to accurate, live data is vital if care homes are to work smarter rather than harder in their plight to safeguard residents.
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