Care home technology
Residents, relatives and staff can share photos of daily life in the home or messages at the same time. It is often used to answer questions about a loved one’s care, so family members can focus on spending time with residents when they come in for a visit. Mobile Care Monitoring and the Relatives
Gateway tool had a crucial role in helping homes communicate with relatives when the country first went into lockdown during the early stages of the pandemic. It remains an important tool that helps with collaborative communication.
Improving sleep with acoustic monitoring After seeing acoustic monitoring in action in the Netherlands, WCS Care became the first care home provider in the UK to install it in 2016. It is non-intrusive technology that listens to sleeping residents and is triggered by unusual sounds beyond a set level for each person’s specific needs. If there is no sound from a resident’s
room, they are left to sleep in peace, rather than being disturbed by hourly door-knocks throughout the night – which is the usual practice in the care sector. Having installed acoustic monitoring in our three new-build homes - including a retrofit - and experiencing a reduction in night-time falls of 34 per cent in the first year of use, we were keen to extend this technology into our existing residential homes for the benefit of more residents. However, the original system needed to be
hard-wired, something that limited its rollout in our older buildings. Now, our supplier CLB has developed a wireless version of the system. This means we are not restricted by the age or layout of the home, with residents in one of our homes in the south of the county among the first in the world to try it.
Lighting the way with circadian lighting at Woodside Care Village in Warwick The acoustic listening box can be placed
discreetly on a bedside table or desk and plugs into a mains socket, connecting to the wider system and monitoring station wirelessly through the home’s existing wi-fi without need for extra cabling. WCS Care has also implemented multi- site monitoring with the same home being remotely monitored from another of our homes, providing additional oversight and staff support for night carers while enhancing care quality.
Human-centric lighting with circadian lighting Several years ago, we first installed circadian lighting as a test in the communal and bedroom areas of one of our existing homes. It imitates nature’s cycles of light, as well as the changes in colour we experience from dawn to dusk.
This natural cycle, which links to our body clock, has a huge impact on our wellbeing and health. When the body clock is running well, we can be active, productive and eat well during the day, and sleep restfully at night when our breathing and heartbeat slows, and our core temperature cools.
Design innovation at Woodside Care Village in Warwick, WCS Care’s newest home 44
When our body clock is running late or early, our natural sleep/wake rhythm is upset, which has a knock-on effect on our health and wellbeing. Around four in five residents living in our homes for older people live with dementia. Also, one in five people with Alzheimer’s disease experience sundowning, sometimes called late-day confusion, but it can also happen generally to older people. A further one in 15 people in the UK suffer from seasonal affective disorder (SAD) syndrome, which tends to impact people more between September and April, because we’re in the northern hemisphere. These conditions, as well as lack of sleep, can lead to depression, over-eating, poor concentration, memory problems, lack of energy, confusion, loss of day orientation and changes in mood. Exposure to natural light - for as little as ten to 15 minutes a day - can help reduce or stop these symptoms. During the day, circadian lighting replaces the sun indoors, and at night stops people being exposed to inappropriate blue or white light, which can delay or disturb sleep patterns. Two years ago, WCS Care extended the use of the lighting to a second home and we now have 87 rooms that benefit from the technology. When we first used circadian lighting, we compared the wellbeing of
www.thecarehomeenvironment.com April 2022
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48
