At Nourish we don’t take the typical path when it comes to care plans. Rather than telling care providers how they ‘should’ go about their care planning, we prefer to learn how they like their own care plans built. We know that care plans are not a one-size-fits-all exercise. There are a whole host of good reasons for care providers to adopt different styles in the care plans they choose to use.

How is a robust care planning template created?

Much has been written about how care plans should be put together. But ultimately, the structure of the care plan template needs to be decided by the senior team of the care provider (including its owners) who will set how the service should be led and by the care managers who will conduct service delivery day to day.

Care planning isn’t just about documents, its about shared journeys with each person

Although it is tempting to shrink the care planning exercise to a structure of needs assessments, a list of support services and the risks involved; good care providers are increasingly recognising that a good care plan covers a representation of a person as a whole. This means they need to cover their wants as well as their needs, their abilities as well as their frailties.

Getting this information goes well beyond an admission interview, or a comprehensive assessment; getting to know a person takes time, and people change their preferences and habits. Care planning is part of all interactions with the person and their close circle of support, family and close friends, not just at discrete times.

Care providers are different and so is their care planning

Some care providers may prefer to tackle recovering mobility with garden activities, others will focus on dancing, this will allow different care providers to resonate with different clients. This is why care plans cannot be the same for all care providers. Because care providers decide, which services to provide and together with their team decide how they are provided, how they are adapted to each individual’s wants and needs, the care planning framework must support the team in this journey.

Fundamental building blocks to a robust care planning framework

The building blocks you need to consider when building each care plan include:

In a modern care planning framework, people receiving care have the ability to continuously give feedback about their care, as well as help to improve and adapt the care they receive. This includes the ability to manage consent, allow a next of kin and other informal carers to record relevant notes, raise warnings and alarms, as well as help to stay involved in the care of the person.

Interactions in someone’s day to day care are typically recorded by carers as daily notes. However increasingly, there is information from connected devices, Telehealth or Telecare equipment, wearables and internet of things (IoT), as well as notes from relatives and volunteers outside of the care provider’s organisation. All of this information, when managed digitally, can be used to automatically update care plans, trigger reviews and enable care managers to have the best possible representation of the context of the person and their care, and feel reassured by the clarity of transparency of the quality of the care being provided.

How can Nourish help with your care planning?

Nourish is designed to support organisations in transforming how care information is managed, with radical improvements to the operation of care services and continuous improvement to care delivery. To find out more please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

We’re going to be attending this year’s Health Plus Care show held in the Excel, London from the 29th to the 30th of June. Billed as the largest national integrated care conference, we’re hoping the event will be a big one for the industry and will be showing off our care management system on stand Q30.

Health Plus Care aims to bring together four different shows, which means that over 9000 attendees from the NHS, care providers, public health and local authorities will be visiting across the two days.

We’ll be demonstrating how Nourish empowers carers and health professionals in almost all health settings, and offering some yummy treats for hungry event goers too. This year we’re also offering one lucky care professional a fantastic spa weekend. All you have to do is visit the stand and talk to the team to find out more.

As a final note we can also provide some last minute guest tickets for any Nourish clients who might’ve missed out on signing up for the event, but still want to go. As tickets are almost sold out at this point, we’d like to make sure all of our clients have the opportunity to attend.

To find out more, drop us an email to caring@nourishcare.co.uk or get in touch  via Intercom and we’ll make sure that you and your team have some complimentary guest passes on us!

We’re looking forward to seeing you there.

At Nourish there are a number of principles that guide our work. Firstly we understand the importance of planning in care, which is why we put care plans at the heart of what we do. Establishing a care plan is key to providing truly personalised care, so we designed Nourish to make that process as smooth as possible.

No two care settings are ever the same, which is why Nourish is flexible and customisable. Our approach is to tailor Nourish to work for care teams, not the other way round. So if a care team has well-established care plans that they are already using, we work with the team to take those care plans online with Nourish – creating the same order that carers are used to. Other settings may prefer to use Nourish care plan templates and then customise them to the care they provide – from nursing care to dementia care to domiciliary care to learning disabilities.

Secondly we use clear, user-friendly design to allow Nourish to fit into carers’ daily work. Care plans can be set up to generate tasks on a daily schedule – for example, if part of a person’s care plan is to monitor a person’s weight loss, daily tasks can be set on the timeline to check nutrition and food intake. Carers have told us time and again that the two hours they used to spend at the end of a shift on paperwork has simply gone, because by the time the shift has finished they have already made all the notes they need to.

Thirdly, care is provided not by a single person, but by a circle of care. Within a residential setting, this may involve the care team, visiting medical staff and family. In home care settings, friends and neighbours may also play a role. With Nourish, notes can easily be made by each person providing care. That information is then stored and organised in the care plan logs in a clear way so that others can access it when they need to.

With all this in place, generating reports no longer involves spending hours retrieving files from the shelves but can be done with just a few clicks, before, after or even during a CQC inspection if required. Care plans can easily be reviewed and audited, which is also vital when it comes to inspection. Reviews may be scheduled, but care teams also have the flexibility to react to changes in a person’s condition which may trigger the need for a care plan review.

Care requires both consistency and flexibility. We designed Nourish to support those needs. Which means care teams can get on with doing what they do best – provide the real, human, compassionate care that enables the people they care for to enjoy the best quality of life possible.

Nourish is proud to announce the launch of a game changing care management product. Writing notes and handling paper records are recurrently quoted as leading contributors to loss of productivity from care providers, and motivation from carers. Nourish removes the chore from daily note recording and care plan updating.

With an all new care integration product, combined with carefully designed mobile apps, Nourish enables carers to record tasks and outcomes on the go. Nourish has managed to bring back the joy of caring, and remove some of the most resource heavy aspects of the job.

Nourish’s apps are completely driven by a secure cloud care plan. This care plan is then used to coordinate everyone who needs to stay in the loop, reducing overall disconnect between families, carers and commissioners. The company is therefore enabling providers to step forward in full alignment with the guidelines of the upcoming Care Act 2015 in all aspects of care integration, community and family engagement in care provision and reporting. Care providers can in turn engage families by offering a secure app to the next of kin, who can stay in the loop of the care being provided.

Nourish Care is exhibiting at stand D14, Birmingham Care Show, 4-5 November 2014.