Leicestershire County Care Ltd (LCCL) provide care to the elderly across multiple homes across the East Midlands. Leicestershire County Care Ltd believe in maintaining the highest standards of quality care, focusing on the wellbeing of all their residents and providing them with person-centred care.
They started rolling out Nourish’s digital care planning platform to their care homes in 2021. Before using Nourish, LCCL were using a combination of paper-based forms to record care notes. The care group attempted their own version of a digital care plan before deciding that, as they didn’t have the resources or an in-house programming unit, that outsourcing a digital care plan provider would be best.
To find the most suitable digital care planning provider for needs of the people they support, the LCCL senior team procured for a digital system thorough multiple sources, attending care supplier forums to have one on one conversations with providers, scheduling virtual demonstrations with the providers they liked the most and spoke to directors of other care homes to see what recommendations they had. For LCCL, the obvious choice was Nourish.
Why Nourish? Key deciding factors for LCCL:
- Ease of use for care teams inputting data from the front line
- Simple care plan creation and management for senior members of staff
- Flexible and clear onboarding process explained at every step with timescales and targets
- Clean fresh design with icons and graphics that made sense
- Warnings feature that provides a great overview of each home
LCCL’s top priority was the ease of use for the care teams on the front line and the managers who would be completing care plans and analysing data from the interactions inputted into the system. Their interest and desire to analyse rich data and oversee the people they support led them to their decision to implement Insights, a suite of pre-defined dashboards that give the senior management team vital information, such as falls or medication errors, to enable them to make more strategic, safer decisions, improving the lives of their residents. Using Insights will give their senior management team greater oversight and governance in all their care homes, allowing managers to have a greater summary of their home with the ability to drill down to each resident or item.
Time Better Spent
By adopting Nourish, carers in LCCL home Whittingham House save approximately 20 minutes per carer per week. With 10 carers on the floor, this works out at 200 minutes per week – just over 3 hours of time saved that can be reallocated back to the people they support. In another LCCL home Harvey House, care staff save an average of an hour a week while care team leaders save at least two hours per week.
This saving means that carers have more time to deliver quality person-centred care and time for activities and outings that are essential to the wellbeing of residents, all going towards improving the health of the people they support.
Using Nourish and Insights gives home managers and the senior management team a bird’s eye view of the homes in the LCCL remit. From Head Office, directors can observe trends across the whole group, while home managers are able to identify trends within residents in their home as well as trends with staff interactions, building team morale and delivering praise or training where required. Before, using paper, if the senior management team wanted to see the care delivered and the health of the residents supported by LCCL, they would have to go each location and read the handwritten notes.
“At Harvey House, I can oversee all residents and staff on a daily basis to ensure all needed interactions have been met. Reports make gathering information such as incidents/accidents, ABC charts easier to manage and audit in a weekly basis, paperwork cannot get lost as everything is all in one place. I can complete these audits at home or at work.” Lisa Pegg, Harvey House Manager
Improvements: Health, wellbeing & person-centred care
Before using Nourish, LCCL relied on paper to record their care notes and create care plans for the people they support. By introducing Nourish, LCCL have seen a difference in the health of their residents where they are able to dedicate more time to care because of the time they save.
Harvey House use the Falls Risk Assessment Tool (FRAT) in the Nourish platform to receive an accurate FRAT score enabling them to take preventative measures. The Mental Health Assessment Tool is able to identify any changes in a person’s mental health, allowing care team leaders to refer their resident’s to the appropriate service which could be the mental health team or medication doses may be increased, reduced or started. All of these audit tools improve resident’s health whether it be from reducing falls, identifying mental health early or lack of nutrition/ hydration. Nourish allows the managers to be proactive as opposed to reactive, halting potential incidents in its tracks purely by analysing the data available in the Nourish platform inputted by their care team.
Not only has there been an improvement in the health and wellbeing of the residents supported by LCCL but there has been an improvement in the discretion of care delivered that supports the resident’s dignity and right to privacy. The Nourish Quick Close Tags allow their care teams to tap their devices on a code, similar to a QR Codes, to record night checks without disturbing the resident. Before this technology, the LCCL carers used a flashlight to find the folder with the required night checks form.
“Things are less likely to get missed by using Nourish. When using paper, we would have to go through every written care note, so sometimes things would get missed. By using Nourish, our carers are able to flag up if someone hasn’t eaten, easily and quickly drawing our attention to this. Before we spent so much time going back to where the care plans are securely stored, going through the care plan booklet and writing everything that happened during the day. The staff now have more opportunity to document what has happened there and then.” Kathleen Bance, Whittingham House Deputy Manager
Continuous Improvement
LCCL found that using Nourish has really helped with them providing higher quality person-centred care as the platform is flexible and can be tailored to each resident. Nourish makes care delivery simpler and monitoring trends easier with dashboards available at the click of a button. Themes can be identified, shared with the wider team via the handover feature and actions implemented before an incident occurs. Falls analysis, for example, can be tracked and analysed much easier than before. For LCCL it used to be a very manual process which now means with Nourish, managers have more time to dedicate to analysing this data, log any lessons learned and evidence what has been done to make a difference.
All staff can access Nourish which enables them to have some oversight as well as senior staff. Reports are shared with the staff group and improvements are made in each area that requires any adaptations or improvement, ensuring that all staff are continually kept informed.
“We are looking to integrate with some of Nourish’s integration partners in the future, mainly Nexus Nurse Call and an eMAR. Having it all on one system is going to be really great for our care team. For Insights, many improvements and new features have been added based upon feedback given by care home providers which was a positive when we decided to onboard Insights.” Stuart Vive-Kananda, Owner
The Nourish Impact
Nourish has made all information more accessible, when writing or reviewing care plans all information is available on the system which makes for a more person-centred care plan which all staff can access. DOLs badges and DNACPR respect badges in the platform aid staff to be more aware of resident’s needs, wishes and restrictions.
Nourish is streamlined in a way that allows the LCCL care team to deliver person-centred care to all residents. Because the system is simple and intuitive to use, the team have been able to spend more meaningful time with residents due to the time saved. When evidencing care, record keeping has been greatly improved. Gaps in records are quickly identified and highlighted. Trends with regards to MUST, Weight loss, Food and Fluid management are more easily identifiable and acted upon.
The ability to give evidence to various stakeholders quickly and efficiently is also one great benefit of using Nourish. LCCL are able to give temporary secure access to the Nourish system to CQC inspectors and Local Authority Compliance inspectors if they wish to view specific care plans. In the current climate of where desktop inspections are taking place more frequently, this has saved an immense amount of time.
“Nourish has definitely made an impact in our care homes. The programme is so simple and easy to follow.” Kathleen Bance, Deputy Manager Whittingham House
Before rolling out Nourish across the 12 services in the LCCL remit, they had 2 homes rated Inadequate, 3 homes rated Requires Improvement and 7 homes rated Good. Since implementing Nourish, they now have 11 homes rated Good, 2 rated Requires Improvement (awaiting a reinspection since using Nourish) and 1 Inadequate (awaiting a reinspection since using Nourish).
“Using Nourish has definitely had a positive impact on our CQC ratings, particularly due to the record keeping features meaning detailed care notes are recorded in the moment. Our goal is to have all services rated as Good and we are confident we can achieve this with Nourish.” Stuart Vive-Kananda, Owner
To find out more about how Nourish can benefit your care service, book your free personalised demo today!
