Care show review
light. After all, as Dr Lockley explained, when it comes to ensuring that a person’s internal clock synchronises correctly with the environment, there is no better time cue than light. If one’s body clock – or circadian pacemaker – goes out of sync, then the negative effects can include sleep disorders, fatigue, performance problems, and hormone and metabolic disorders. According to the science, care providers should think about alternating two different types of light in their homes – to increase alertness during the day and create a ‘daylight’ feel, both the overall light level and the proportion of blue-wavelength light should be increased. Conversely, to encourage sleepiness, care homes should decrease both the general light level and blue-wavelength content in the evening but increase the amount of orange-enriched light to emphasise a ‘firelight’ atmosphere.
Emerging from data silos Thursday at Care Show Birmingham began at the Care Keynote Stage with Putting people back at the heart of care management: systems that put the emphasis back on people, courtesy of Andy Croudace, innovation director at Advanced Business Solutions. Andy talked about the challenges Advanced faced in creating a unified digital solution for care providers in a sector saddled with a myriad of different systems and processes, where, traditionally, care workers have had “… no visibility of each other’s siloed roles” – which, on a day-to-day basis, could result in care workers impacting each other in a negative way without even realising it. Such a fractured and messy approach has led to “…hundreds of data silos, hundreds of disjointed processes, and that arguably has an impact on the people that work in care and their ability to create efficient working processes,” according to Andy. The consequences of this status quo are
clear. Andy cited Advanced’s own research, which found “twenty three per cent of care providers saying that they’ve got poor visibility of key events such as accidents, incidents, and safeguarding”, and half of providers revealing that the systems they currently use are so poor that they have had to develop their own additional processes in order to get “… sufficient visibility of this kind of data.” Overall, “… in terms of business intelligence, providers are still struggling to collate meaningful management information.” No wonder, then, that Care Show
November 2023
www.thecarehomeenvironment.com
Birmingham featured such a dizzying range of competing digital solutions. Of course, trying to decide which of these solutions to use is no easy task for any provider. A little while later, James Maynard and
Alex Nash of Access later took to the Care Keynote Stage to explain their vision of Enabling digital and dynamic care delivery, with James pointing out that the pandemic had had an unexpected but welcome impact on the adoption of digital solutions in the care sector. “There were data barriers for years,” he explained, “but one of the positive things that [the pandemic] did was force organisations to break down some of those data barriers. We had to mobilise individuals to work from home – we had to do things differently, and that required us to share data more effectively, not only in social care but also from a healthcare perspective.” A key challenge, according to James,
was ensuring an integrated approach that incorporated both health and social care data. “How do we begin to look at those care records?” asked James. “How do we bring those together? How can you surface that data in an effective way? We need those analytics. We want that insight. We want to know – and be able to see more about – what individuals are doing and feed that into other care planning software and products that we have available to us.”
It is important, according to James, to “ … look at care from a continuum perspective … until you begin to look at it from that perspective, everything will remain in silos.” What might this ‘care continuum’ look like? By way of an example: “It’s about how we take patients that are in an acute setting and begin to step down their
care,” James explained. “And then how we use technology to support them as they go through social and community care environments.”
The importance and potential of data
was certainly a key theme running through many of the presentations at this year’s show. “Data is the most exciting and most valuable asset that you have as providers,” said James, “but it’s only valuable if you can use it effectively. Otherwise it becomes a risk: where is it shared? What’s it used for? How do you access it? Who accesses it, and when? But if you can harness and understand the data you’ve got, and then begin to drive value from that data, that’s where the true insight will come from.”
Getting CQC ready Our final Care Keynote of the show was also, by some margin, the best attended. How to get CQCready saw Louie Werth, director of Care Research, explaining the nuts and bolts of the CQC’s forthcoming new inspection regime. There is clearly some anxiety amongst providers regarding the new regime, which will be phased in across the UK over the coming months, but Louie did an excellent job of condensing providers’ obligations down to the key basics, and it seemed to me that the audience left the Care Keynote Theatre feeling at least a little reassured and certainly better informed as to what the new CQC regime required of them.
Care Show Birmingham was a great
event – well attended across both days and packed with hundreds of interesting exhibitors from all corners of social care. Can the organisers top this year’s show? We’ll be back in 2024 to find out.
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