For The You Trust, great support is about focusing on what each person can do and helping them take an active role in their community. Across Hampshire, the organisation supports more than 500 people with learning disabilities through a diverse range of services, including supported living, floating support and outreach. Whether someone is learning to make a cup of tea, travel independently or move towards employment, every journey is shaped around their individual goals, choices and potential.
The You Trust has worked with Nourish for two years, using its flexibility to create a digital system that reflects the realities of community based supported living. From co-produced support plans and accessible visual records to real-time notes captured while out in the community and engaging with people and their families. Nourish helps teams document progress, promote independence and build a clearer picture of each person’s experience.
That impact is also reflected in two separate CQC inspections covering supported living and floating support services, both of which achieved an Outstanding rating for care. We sat down with Steve Almond, Assistant Director of Care, Support and Community Wellbeing, and Catherine Jones, District Service Manager, to explore how Nourish supports their can-do philosophy, strengthens engagement with the people they support and helps care professionals evidence high-quality, responsive care across a varied and far-reaching service.
Sections
Supporting supported living 🔗
The You Trust champions the journeys of people utilising their service
Supportive technology 🔗
What makes Nourish the ideal digital partner for the unique challenges of supported living and LD services
Better together 🔗
The importance of co-production and how Nourish helps The You Trust engage with their community
Can do attitude 🔗
How The You Trust are using the Nourish app is promote engagement and independence for their clients
Regaling the regulators 🔗
How Nourish helped The You Trust improve from a Good in ‘Care’ to an Outstanding in their CQC inspection
A system for care professionals 🔗
How Nourish supports better quality notes, detailed support and more efficient shifts for care professionals
What is The You Trust’s philosophy for supporting your community through your supported living and LD services?
“In terms of our values,” said Steve, “we’re very much about being community based, getting our clients involved in the community and being active participants.
“Whether that is through using the local shops, through working, using the leisure facilities or utilising public transport. We are committed to supporting people to gain the skills and independence to do those things themselves. Particularly in care today where there is a drive to reduce dependence. Partially due to giving people increased independence but also saving money.
“Care at the end of the day is ultimately about supporting people to achieve what they’re able and want to achieve. And I think historically that’s not always been available to people over the years. Certainly, when I first became involved in care in the 1980s, it was a very different world. People were supported, but the support always looked at what a person couldn’t do. Whereas our philosophy now is what a person can do.
“It’s about ensuring people are getting the right support in the way that suits them to enable them to make their own choices. So that’s certainly our philosophy, community-based care, where people can be active in their community as a participant.
“For us, it is all about supporting people on their journey. Helping them to achieve their goals, whether it’s something small like making a cup of tea on their own, or something big like getting a job and living more independently. Everyone’s journey is different, at The You Trust, we’re here to support them all equally.”
What makes Nourish Better Care an effective digital solution for your supported living service?
“First and foremost, the flexibility of the system,” said Steve. “We are not a care home, we are supported living, that’s what we do. The way we can structure Nourish to fit the needs of those we support is fantastic. Such as using the templates and being able to adjust them to meet ours and people’s needs, is ideal for us.
“With the The You Trust, as a support living provider, I know from experience that a lot of the options out there are very care home focused. Things like support planning, risk assessments and their tools are very much geared towards care homes.
“We’re not a care home. We’re supported living and that’s what we do.
“Let’s be frank because, councils have only got so much money to spend on care. Naturally, they’ve got to look at how it can best be used whilst achieving the same outcomes for people.
“Nourish has enabled us to show all of that and it also allowed us to see people’s care journeys more clearly. Nourish shows people’s progress throughout the platform. You can see the progress through the notes, through the recordings, through the development of the risk assessments.
“The ability to see and share those stories was a real benefit of Nourish for us as a supported living provider.”
What else makes Nourish an effective digital partner for supported living services like The You Trust?
“Nourish is a live system,” said Steve. “Our people don’t need to be in an office with a file on their lap or on the table writing in it. They can be out and about in the community, doing it in the community.
“You can upload pictures, you can write notes, all while you’re out in the community. Which means we can be more present when we’re with people, while also being more detailed when reporting on their care journey.
“All of The You Trust staff carry phones with the Nourish app. So they all use their mobile phones to document their interactions and focus on what they’re doing.
“Documenting what they do is a key part of their job. Because let’s face it, if you don’t evidence it, it didn’t happen. Our teams find Nourish is a simple system to use.
“It really is. The Nourish app is good. It’s accessible in every sense. Even if you are in an area where there’s no signal, when you go into an area with signal, it will then upload. So you can use it anywhere, confident that you will not lose any information you record.
“We can also grant access to Nourish at different levels, including to families if the client wants to. We certainly make sure the clients have full access to their support plans and risk assessments, as well as ensuring they’re actively involved in developing all those things.”
How does Nourish support The You Trust’s commitment to co-production?
“Co-production is crucial for us,” said Steve. “When we write people’s support plans, we do it with them, its their plan. People’s involvement very much depends upon their ability, their needs and their circle of support. We have good relationships with our clients because we see a lot of them and we actively involve them and their families.
“We work closely with social and health services, who we involve in developing those support plans alongside the person. And then we’ll put the plan in such a way that it’s understandable and accessible for the person. We can do easy read versions as well as versions for the staff to follow. Which are more detailed and enable a consistent approach to someone’s care & support.
How does that work in practice?
“It’s about tailoring it to people’s needs. We do that for everything. One of the things we are utilising Nourish for, and it’s had a real impact that’s really noticeable, is we’re going paperless. We’ve transitioned from the days where you go into one of the offices and one of the properties where there’s loads of files. All those files have gone and we’ve created other systems on Nourish in place of them which meet the needs of our commissioners, other professionals such as GP’s, housing and CQC etc.
“We’ve got the managers’ areas, we’ve got staff areas, we’ve got client areas on Nourish. So, our health and safety reports now get uploaded onto Nourish, our incident reporting forms, anything like that. Anything to do with the buildings, anything that’s related to the client, it goes on to Nourish. Its all stored securely meeting GDPR data requirements and can be accessed at the right levels to a person’s role to ensure confidentiality.
“This was such a game changer for us that we looked to take Nourish further than what we originally expected. We thought Nourish would just be a support planning system, but actually we’ve taken it far beyond that.
“It’s freeing up space, space in our facilities, space in our day, space in our minds. All of which we can use to build more efficient, greener, effective care experiences for our clients.”
How does Nourish help you focus your community on what they can do, rather than what they can’t do?
“It’s much more accessible for those we support to use and to look at,” said Steve. “Nourish enables people to be more actively involved in their care through its accessibility.
“We use a lot of pictures, particularly for those who struggle with reading and writing. We use a lot of pictures and signs and symbols so they can see how they’re going to be supported. That’s been incredible for improving co-production and engagement.
“Additionally, a lot of our clients also use phones. So, they can have Nourish on their phones. This makes it really easy to involve them in their care planning. You’re not going to walk around with a large file, but you do walk around with a phone and they can see.”
How does that help them?
“We put some timers on there for people so they can see things like their medication times, or when they need to get up in the morning.
“We have warnings set up on Nourish to alert us. ‘OK, has that person done that?’ All those links and connections are really good for encouraging involvement and independence.
“We can integrate it with systems like Alexis. So that can form part of someone’s support plan with timers and reminders. Then they’ve got the warnings for us to ensure these things are happening and it’s all linked together through Nourish!
“That’s one of the ways in which Nourish benefits funders like the Local Authority. You can start reducing the amount of one to one hours that person needs. Tasks you needed to be with someone to ensure they’re doing, you can now do by phone
“We support a diverse range of people and needs, so naturally this isn’t an option for everyone. But it can be a fantastic tool for the right people to help them take some extra responsibility and another step towards their goals. While we can stay informed, engaged and assured they are developing in a safe, responsible way.”
How has Nourish Better Care helped you improve your compliance?
“I’ve got no doubt that Nourish enabled us as an organisation to go from a Good in ‘Caring’ to an Outstanding,” said Steve.
“Because it made finding evidence much easier at The You Trust. We gave the inspector access to Nourish so they could look themselves at what we were doing. They weren’t relying on us saying ‘there’s a paper folder with all the written notes around personal care.’ Thanks to Nourish they could highlight keywords and easily find what they wanted.
“Additionally, it allowed them to review our full range of service types from the office, where historically inspectors were reliant on going to a service. Which just isn’t feasible when it comes to the variety of people and needs we support.
“Organisationally we support over 500 people with a learning disability across Hampshire. Some live in their own homes, some live in small shared supported living services, others live in flats or individual properties. It’s a real mix. A CQC inspector is never going to have capacity to go around all those different places to see all those different people. Which means they can never get the full view of our service.
“Whereas now they could come to our office, they could meet with myself and my registered managers, they could view all of their support from one central location. Which then enables the inspector to choose at random who they went to see out in the community to verify what they were reading.”
How beneficial is this easy to access information for regulatory inspectors with the increased focus on observation as a part of their inspections?
“It’s vital,” said Steve. “The inspector was able to see the written record and then conduct the observation. Which meant they could marry the two types of evidence together. The fact that they had such a vast quantity of information readily available to them was hugely impactful on our final rating.
“Especially given the way we’d structured it using some of the Nourish templates. Customising them to meet our needs was ideal for us, particularly to support the quite varied needs of the people utilising The You Trust.
“One of the other major benefits for us as managers are the timelines. We can set the timelines and set the warnings on. Which means the CQC could see the warnings when they were looking. The inspector could see where Nourish enables us to identify when things aren’t getting done. It allows them to be able to see how we’re responding to those warnings if things aren’t getting done. All of which helps illustrate clearly not only what we do, but how and why we took those actions to support our community.”
How do your care professionals at The You Trust find using Nourish for supported living services?
“It’s been a game changer for us,” said Catherine. “I think some of the staff were quite apprehensive to begin with, particularly the older staff. But once they’ve started using it, it’s really self-explanatory, and the benefits quickly shine through.
“All of our support staff have got mobile phones which they can use to document care through the day. Whereas, before we used Nourish they would have to sit down at the end of a shift in front of a computer and type up their notes in one big chunk. Generally, in a Microsoft Word doc, or some other standalone platform.
“Now throughout their shift they’re able to update plans and sign off tasks as they go. They can do it more as a rolling update rather than being one long chapter about what they’ve done, written at the end of the day. Instead, the care is broken down, specific and detailed. When it comes to detail the pictures are a really beneficial part of it as well. After all a picture tells a thousand words!
“They can update it on the go too, if they’re out and about, they can do it on the bus on the way home. They can do it in the park, wherever they’re at. Which reflects the care we provide so much more effectively than a long entry at the end of the day, not to mention saving time for the team.”
What is the benefit of care professionals using the Nourish app to take notes throughout the day?
“First and foremost,” said Catherine, “people can remember more. Whereas before at the end of your shift, after seven and a half or sometimes even a 15-hour shift, you’re not going to remember small details. If you’re doing it as you go, you remember all the little details as you’re doing it. Which is crucial for providing quality supported living care.
“A cut on a toe for example, it might be a tiny little cut, but it might get worse. It might be if someone’s got a bruise on their arm, it might be something that someone’s been grabbed and then you can look back and see where it’s linked to as well. You can identify the patterns.
“They updates are all time stamped and attributed, so you can easily see who did what, when and why. Which wasn’t possible at The You Trust previously.
“If I’ve supported someone with medication, I can fill that bit in. If Steve’s then gone in and supported someone to get dressed, he can add that. We can divide it into various different people doing the tasks as well.
“So once things are uploaded, they’re easy to review, discuss and respond to. Running the reports is really helpful as well. We’ve had some issues in one of our services where someone’s having a few behavioural problems. With Nourish we can run the reports to see the ABCs that have been filled in. We can see if there’s any patterns quickly and simply. As opposed to having to go in and read six weeks’ worth of notes to find a pattern on their behaviour. Now we can run a report and focus our attention and time directly on the person we support.”
How do you feel about The You Trust’s future with Nourish Care as your digital partner?
“I think it’s got lots of other exciting things that we can look into,” said Catherine. “Especially when we look at the AI capabilities of Nourish Confidence. That sounds quite exciting. I love that Nourish is developing all the time itself. It’s going to help us to develop and help us to be able to evidence what we’re doing. I think it’s a really good product.
“I appreciate working with you as a partnership,” added Steve. “We are a supported living provider, and a lot of technology out there is geared towards elderly care. At Nourish you really listen to our feedback and understand what is and isn’t the right fit for our service. We feel like we’re really building solutions for our community with you. That’s a key reason why Nourish is the right fit for us as a digital partner in the first place.”
