Social care technology grew rapidly over the past 5 years. A variety of digital and technical solutions for the range of challenges that care providers face every day. In the rush to provide effective solutions suppliers created a new problem, replacing analogue silos of information with digital ones. The Nourish Partnership Programme addresses this problem by building a comprehensive digital estate of integration partners, that our users can review and apply to their service as required, so they can continue to provide outstanding care for their communities.
Raise a Chorus
Communication is a two-way street. The ability to engage with a person utilising your service’s circle of care is fast becoming one of the most sought-after features for digital platforms in social care. Care providers who involve the families of the people utilising their service gain a wealth of benefits: more engaged community, more informed circles of care and, as reflected in the Care Quality Commission’s single assessment framework, a more impressed regulator. That’s why we at Nourish Care are so excited to announce our partnership with Altra, a wellbeing and engagement app!
Altra boasts a range of features that give care providers the tools to engage with families directly. This feedback and survey functionality keeps the people who matter to your community close to the things that matter to them. Altra delivers a combination of features. These enable you to drive continuous improvement, capture important feedback and provide detailed evidence to your regulator.
Experience and Evidence
The single assessment framework reflects a new impetus from the CQC to be more person-centred. Not only in the care provided, but in the access granted to that care, and the openness to input and feedback on that care. This impetus is reflected in regulators across the UK, best described in the tenants of socialcarefuture’s ‘Making it Real’ campaign.
The CQC specifically named three evidence categories under their new single assessment framework defined by feedback. Feedback from partners, feedback from staff and leaders and people’s experience of health and care services. Regulators, commissioners and legislators share this focus on lived experience. Altra’s suite of engagement features helps providers maintain a continuous loop of feedback from their communities. One that satisfies both regulators and the people utilising your service.
Quality evidence is the best way to define your care to the satisfaction of your regulator. The act of gathering this evidence consistently helps to define and ensure satisfaction for your team, community and wider circles of care.
Getting Better All the Time
Continuous improvement is driven by continuous communication. When care providers open themselves up to routine feedback and engage directly with people at all levels of their service they enjoy a wealth of benefits. It is an intrinsically person-centred approach to care. One that requires both a sincere willingness to drive change and a conscious commitment to putting in the work.
Altra simplifies this process. Through their surveys, feedback forms and circle of care platform access they turn the awkward into the actual. Gathering the feedback you need to continually improve your service in line with your communities’ experiences becomes a straightforward undertaking. One that is centralised in your Altra system and easily reviewed and implemented.
With the heightened focus on promoting person-centred care sweeping across social care it is more important than ever to capture feedback. Of course, given the considerable pressures that care providers regularly face this undertaking needs to be as immediate and efficient as possible.
The ability to gather and act upon the information your community gives you improves both the quality of your care, as well as the perception your regulator views you from. Evidence is crucial for properly demonstrating your outstanding care, and with Altra that evidence is available at the touch of a button.
Forms for the Whole Family
No two care providers are totally alike. The key motivator for gathering feedback from your community is to illustrate their unique and individual needs, wants and ambitions. As a result, no ready-made form will ever fully satisfy the specifics of your service, or the people who draw upon it to live their lives to the fullest.
Altra addresses this challenge with their fully customisable survey builder. This functionality gives you the freedom to wrap your feedback around your service. Focus your inquiries on the things that really matter to the people utilising your care. These surveys can then be tied into other aspects of Altra to produce positive, person-centred results.
One example of this in action is the menu-sharing functionality. With Altra, you can set up a survey that regularly reviews your meal plans and how much people are enjoying them. You can even add sections for suggestions. This creates a feedback loop that continually improves the quality of life for people with your support. Each incremental change closer ties your service to the people who provide, use and rely upon it. Change doesn’t have to happen all at once. It is a process. One that works better the more perspectives you include in it.
Efficient and Effective Feedback
One of the quickest and easiest ways to gather feedback in Altra is through polls. These polls can be set up succinctly and easily accessed in your posts on Altra. Invite members of the people you support’s circle of care to engage with these polls through the app to increase the width of your feedback gathering.
Polls give you a clear overview of general sentiment towards a specific aspect of your service. This can relate to activities you are engaging in, proposed changes to your care and whatever else your team finds beneficial to post about. While more in-depth interviews and surveys can provide a wealth of information. This can be unwieldy at times and difficult to decipher. Especially in the context of increasing workforce pressures for your team.
With polls, you can get a concise and clear understanding of the experiences and perspectives you need. This benefit soothes both ways, as many members of a circle of care are hard-pressed for free time themselves. Polls give them an efficient and effective way to stay engaged in the care of their loved ones and make them feel listened to and respected.
Care Home Community
To be a community is to be involved in each other’s lives. Altra makes this process simpler than ever before. It turns the ambitious and at times intimidating call for greater family involvement in care into an easily achievable, and evidencable, undertaking. So that no matter where we start, we are all heading in the same direction.
You can read more about Altra’s functionality:
Activities and Wellbeing
Communication and Family Engagement
