What is Care at Home?
Care at Home, otherwise known as Home Care, is supportive care provided in the home to help those in need who find it difficult to cope with daily, routine tasks such as moving around, making meals or dressing. The service enables people to safely live independently in their own home. Care at Home providers have a duty of care to provide effective, quality care and to ensure that individuals are treated with respect and dignity.
What services do Care at Home workers deliver?
Care workers provide various services as part of their role including assistance with medication, help to prepare meals and assisting with bathing, dressing or assisting with getting in and out of bed. According to The Quality Care Commission, a good care home should be safe, effective, caring, responsive to people’s needs and well led. Additionally, Health and Social Care Standards suggest that across all Health & Social Care Services, effective service delivery should include principles such as treating those who require care with dignity and respect, compassion, to be included and to ensure responsive care, support and wellbeing. With such a large demand in service, it’s important care providers are able to meet this demand.
What are the main challenges within Care at Home services?
Today, there is a huge demand for people requiring Care at Home and managing that demand can be difficult. Care at Home organisations require efficient processes in place to automate procedures, enhance communication between care workers and service users while delivering an effective quality care service.
Care at Home organisations face many challenges including managing staff capacity and efficiently scheduling staff to deliver effective service delivery. Currently, care staff have difficulty accessing care plans within their current back office systems. This disconnect leads to lack of visibility of service users’ information and lack of ability to share knowledge and use this knowledge to deliver care. Additionally, according to The Quality Care Commission feedback from service users suggests that lack of communication updates, such as missed or late calls or text message alerts, as well as the ability to provide continuity of care are all areas of concern within Care at Home services.
So, what can Care at Home providers do to support these challenges? The introduction of mobile and scheduling technology allows care organisations to enhance service delivery, improve communication with service users and allow for efficient sharing of information and care plans. Real time data and information can provide care organisations with insightful information to speed up processes, gain full visibility of care teams and increase capacity across your care workforce.
How is technology driving the change in Care at Home Services?
With rapidly progressing technology, care providers have the potential to transform how care services are provided. The introduction of mobile workforce management, scheduling and alerting technologies processes all of the information recorded, reviews and actions this information, enabling care visits to be automated and delivered more efficiently. This enables staff with the ability to access records, update records and have full visibility of care plans while delivering a quality care service.
Streamlining processes allows for improved capacity of your care workforce allowing your staff to spend more face to face time with service users where they can receive the care in the comfort of their own home. Resource optimisation also improves costs with the ability to do more with less resources and reduces the need for agency staff. Additionally, reducing manual data entry and paper-based processes ensures compliance and also reduces costs. Those receiving the care service can benefit from improved communications with their care worker as well as a better-quality service. Furthermore, real time information allows managers to have full visibility of service delivery, allowing them to be reactive as the day unfolds, scheduling staff appropriately, while managing continuity issues and using real time insights to deliver improved processes.
By implementing such technologies and using the data generated to deliver key insights, those delivering Care at Home services are able to better action care plans and overcome challenges and barriers they are currently facing.
A solution to enhance Care at Home Services from Totalmobile
Totalmobile provides care organisations with a solution to deliver efficient and effective care plans within their Care at Home service delivery. The solution augments Totalmobile’s core suite of products with intuitive and responsive real time support monitoring and planning capabilities. It delivers an end to end solution that allows you to measure the wellbeing of service users, set up schedules for their care plan and check capacity for onboarding new service users. Additionally, you can also dynamically schedule daily visits to optimise care workers, track progress of their working day, ensure safeguarding and information sharing while providing the necessary tools to manage the entire service using a combination of our dashboards, reports and alerts.
For further information on our solution and how it can benefit your organisation, contact us on info@totalmobile.co.uk