Through specialist care homes, retirement living and vibrant community groups, Methodist Homes (MHA) supports people to live well at every stage of later life. The charity uses innovative technology like interactive tables and robotic pets for people with dementia. Alongside projection technology and digital care plans. These all help to improve the care and support they provide to older people.
We spoke to Jason Briggs, MHA’s Head of Strategy, Change and Performance. He tells us how going digital has led to more person-centred care.
Why did you decide to go digital?
“It plays into a broader strategic direction for us as an organisation. A couple of years ago we decided we needed to be data-driven as part of our culture. Technology isn’t something that we bolt onto the side of what we do, it’s integral to what we do. We decided to undertake the biggest digital transformation as an organisation in our 80 years.
“We use a business intelligence tool called Power BI to help us visualise information within the organisation. This is because we were looking to transform our care by digitising our care plans and interactions and we chose Nourish.”
How does Nourish help?
We want to put as much of our time as possible into supporting people to live their lives. Having lots of information at our fingertips means everything can be tailored to the individual and give a person-centred approach.
We have a suite of dashboards open to our home managers and other management teams across our services. We’ve tied this in with our incident reporting information. It allows us to see a more holistic view of the service we’re providing.
How did you find adapting to digital?
“We assumed when we first implemented it that we’d need to put a huge amount of effort into supporting our carers to adopt it. There were fears around the sheer volume of things on paper that we would need to put into digital, plus a nervousness around the adoption of technology. Within 24 hours of our first go-live pilot, those assumptions were quashed. It’s naturally intuitive and everyone got on with it from the start.
“I recently got chatting to one of our carers who has been with the organisation for almost 20 years and she was terrified about using the technology. She’s been using it for a couple of months now and described Nourish as the ‘glue’ that connects the home in a way that was never possible before.”
How has care become more person-centred?
A good example of that was recently one of our senior carers was developing the support plan for one of our residents. We did this by sitting side by side with the resident sharing the device. They could both speak into it and the resident was able to not only contribute, but to be central to the process. It’s so empowering and it wouldn’t be possible without technology.
Before digital support plans and recording interactions via Nourish, we were reliant on communication within the home and the connectedness of the people who worked there. Now, if someone missed their breakfast, it sends an alert. It means a carer can talk to the resident to find out more and everyone in the home is aware, including the managers and seniors. Come lunchtime, we know to make that person a priority.
How does it support your day-to-day work?
As we work with older people, quite often they need to go to hospital. In seconds, we have the ability to run an emergency discharge report to give the ambulance crew what they need. Undoubtedly, this is making a huge difference to older people. Especially in those critical moments as they leave our service to go to hospital.
Another example is how area management teams can walk into a service without spending the first two hours looking at paperwork. Instead, they have all the information they need at their fingertips which they can read whenever suits them. It means when they’re going into our homes, they’re able to have more meaningful conversations. They can see information like weight trends and take proactive action. All these things are making a substantial difference to people’s quality of life.
