Embracing Technology at Park House Care Home

Here at Park House care home, we strongly believe that businesses in our sector should be investing in the latest advanced technology in order to provide the most efficient, safe, accurate and responsive level of care available.

Very few dementia care homes have invested as heavily in high-quality advanced technology as Park House has and is doing, putting them and their residents at a significant disadvantage when it comes to communication, management and responsiveness. Park House care home has embraced the recent rise in advanced technology and implemented a number of systems and services throughout our homes. These systems are as follows –

Nourish

Nourish is an incredibly advanced next-generation care management system that has been implemented here at Park House. Every member of staff on duty in the home has continuous access to Nourish via a smartphone, and has the ability to plan, record, report and co-ordinate care ‘on the go’ 24 hours a day. This offers many benefits to our residents, including:

● Our staff spend less time doing paperwork and therefore spend more time providing care to our residents

● The teams can carry out internal audits more quickly allowing the home to run more efficiently

● We can tailor plans and actions to our resident’s exact personal needs and wishes more easily and deliver on them much much faster

● Digital recording of all care tasks in real-time means that we can ensure that we carry out every task and activity required by each resident’s very individualised care plan including activities and social events

As the software also allows every member of our staff to know much more about each individual resident, such as their preferences and needs than paper records ever could, we are able to provide a far more responsive and proactive care service.

Responsive care is one of our top priorities here at Park House. Using the Nourish software system we will have a much faster communication system. For example, if a resident would like a snack then a carer can send a message directly to the kitchen and will receive confirmation notifications when the food is being prepared when the food is ready to be delivered to the resident, and when the resident has received their food.

Nourish is also being used by management at all levels, meaning the registered manager and directors are notified immediately should tasks not have been completed on time. This allows for a much-improved quality of care and significant savings in management time.

MED e-care

Park House care home is planning in 2020 to implement MED e-care, an advanced computer system to manage and monitor the ordering and administration of medications.

The system (MED e-care) is a very well established software supported by our dispensing pharmacy. Our four-weekly orders and one-off prescriptions can be easily submitted online using the MED e-care system, making the process of ordering our residents medications as simple as possible and removes much human error.

The system greatly improves the safety surrounding medication use and administration, whilst providing 100% accurate and detailed information to GP’s, nurses, the pharmacy and our care home staff.

Each medication prescribed to be administered day or night can be recorded individually on the system, issuing alerts should medications be administered outside of the recommended time slot or not administered at all.

We believe that the health and wellbeing of our residents should be taken very seriously; therefore we believe we have a real obligation to invest in the best possible software such as MED e-care to ensure that all of our residents receive the best and safest care possible.

Sensors

In our homes, we use a number of different types of non-invasive sensors in order to improve the safety of our residents. The use of sensors is dependent on the needs of the resident and they are only used with full consent of the resident or their Power of Attorney. Our sensors include pressure mats by beds, under chairs or in doorways to alert staff of residents getting out of bed or wanting to get up out of a chair.

Our sensors allow our staff to assist our residents that may require help or have limited mobility. We are investing our time into evaluating a number of additional safety measures to detect and prevent incidents such as falls in order to ensure that all residents in our care are as safe as possible.

Free Wi-Fi

We now have free high-quality Wi-Fi available throughout all of our homes including communal areas and residents’ bedrooms. Free internet access allows our residents’ full use of the internet and allows them to make and receive video and voice calls to friends and family whenever they want to – meaning our resident’s families know they can always keep in touch.