Onboarding Case Study: Care Concern Group

Care is a personal journey. For Care Concern Group it is one that begins before you ever reach one of their residences. It starts the moment you first make contact with them and reflects the individual you are, and the life you want to lead. Care Concern Group supports their residents to live the life they want, in a place they can call home. A life that involves your family, your friends, your interests and idiosyncrasies. This person-led approach to care drives Care Concern Group’s continued growth, and excellent reputation. As a result of their impressive growth, Care Concern Group used a wide variety of care management solutions, and when it became time for them to unify their processes, they chose Nourish Care. We sat down with their Quality Manager Richard Maddison to learn why Nourish’s customisability, information sharing and ease of use made it the right system to join them on their ambitious expansion. 

We also discussed our Insights dashboards and how they are positively informing and impacting their care. You can read that case study here. 

“It’s the best system that I’ve used. When you’re planning for the long road, you go with the best.”

Richard Maddison Quality Manager

“I’d say, at some point over the last 10 years, I’ve probably used most of the systems that are out there. Initially, when I came into this role, we were more like a collection of companies than one big one. Everybody did their own thing. Managers would use whatever system they wanted to. Additionally, with our continued expansion, we inherited different digital systems in use in the homes we purchased. So, I have had to deal with lots of the digital systems that are out there. 

“Mercifully, our plan is to move everyone on to the same system, Nourish. All of the homes that were on paper are moving straight to Nourish. We also recently finished moving all of our homes from one particular platform over to Nourish and we plan to continue this transition for all our homes.” 

“It’s the best system that I’ve used. When you’re planning for the long road, you go with the best. It can be person-led, like we are. It gives you that option to make it bespoke to us, to our company. This is what I tell our staff when I talk to them about Nourish. So when they look at it, they can see the information on there is ours. It’s our premium assessment that’s on there, not a generic one. It’s our care plan templates on there, our policies, it’s our processes that makes us, us. Nourish is a system and like every system there’s a generic structure you’ve got to have on there. But then you can tailor it to our specific needs, and I find that really good.  

“For example, today I worked on some positive behaviour support policies and forms, and I uploaded them straight into Nourish. I then tasked the staff with an interaction for them to read the policy before filling in the forms. For me, that’s tremendous. The communication, the alerts, the trackability, there’s so much about just that functionality that I really like.  

“You don’t have to go rooting through folders, or files. It’s all there, and it’s the same when you do your care plans or you are reviewing them. If you link things, you can literally see everything you need to see in one place. It’s the same for the staff, when you’re reading Nourish, you don’t have to come out and go find the information somewhere else. You should literally, if you use it correctly, be able to review something and see every single bit of info you need. You just need to scroll down and read it all.” 

“The support for us has been there from the start. From our training to our Account Manager, and we’ve had meetings with your Clinical Lead as well. To make sure we’re setting Nourish up the way we want to use it. In general, I think, like everything, the more you use it, the more you become used to it. It’s easier for our teams who have some time to set up and get comfortable with the system. They can hit the ground running. It can be tough when you are switching from digital or paper to a new system. There will be one point during the transition where you must use two systems, and keep them both updated. I honestly don’t know what more you could do to support us during our transition when you don’t have access to the previous system we were using. 

“That’s why we’re focused on having a plan. Again, this is manager led, and we really see the benefits when the managers take ownership and lead their homes adoption of Nourish.” 

“The oversight if offers us has been a god send. Before we had to travel to each home to see what’s going on. Now we can see it at a glance. That, for me, is massive. It’s the same for our Care Concern Group managers. Managers direct so much information, they have to send information up the chain to the Registered Director, which ends up going to the board. It’s so convenient for them to get it at the click of a button. It’s all at your fingertips, if you want to look at who’s got power of attorney, who’s got an MCA, anything you need. You can just literally click the button, see it, that’s massive for us.  

“They’re really positive about it. Particularly, for example, I was in Scotland recently and there are some recent changes to new MCAs and consent. Effectively, the people in Scotland can’t use the English policies and vice versa. It’s a small change, but with big repercussions. You can’t make the mistake of adhering to the wrong legislation. Thanks to Nourish, and our ability to tailor it to our service, that is not something anyone needs to be concerned about. We establish best practice in Nourish and it’s simple for our teams to follow it.” 

“Oversight in Nourish is more prevalent than any other system we have. You can see what people are doing and the pathways they’re following. You can see it all and that makes it so much easier. It makes it much easier for our managers once they get used to it. Like I said at the start, the more you use Nourish, the more you get out of it, the more information you can get from the system.” 

“Definitely, that’s the feedback from the staff once they get used to using Nourish. I know once we do some training and we show them how easy it is to use we’ll be flying. Say when you’re doing someone’s fluid or to change someone’s position in the middle of the night, it’s literally three buttons. So, if you’ve got someone who’s just turning from left to right, you’re literally just ticking left to right on Nourish and that’s it. Information recorded and shared across the system for everyone to utilise. Bang, job done.” 

“Absolutely. The Care Inspectorate in Scotland love Nourish. The feedback we’ve had from the last two inspections highlighted how much oversight our managers have. And how much we can share with them. We had an inspection in Edinburgh recently and they were blown away by the fact we could give them a bespoke login that just showed them the information they wanted on the people they were funding. We can do it for local authorities as well. It’s really good. 

“The feedback from everyone is great, all the local authorities, the CQC, the CI. We’ve never had anybody come back and say ‘We couldn’t use it’ or ‘looks like you staff don’t know what they’re doing’. They’ve all come back with positive feedback. 

“It’s also the fact that they can see what the staff are doing. They know sometimes when you are caring for people there are gaps. And they can see that Nourish is turned on. They can see that the warnings are switched on. They can see that if something is not done, Nourish will tell the staff. The inspectors understand care, they know it’s not about the fact you haven’t done it, sometimes you’re busy, and if you’re busy, you can forget things. The way that Nourish works, if you put it on and you’re busy, at some point, it will remind you that you need to do it, which is fantastic. It’s basically a fail safe for best practice.” 

I love Nourish, I’ve been with you from the start. I love that you can see the journey some of our staff have gone on with Nourish. We’ve had real trouble at the start, where people have struggled with it, or thought, ‘I’m never going to manage this’. These are people who’ve never used computers professionally. People who worked in care for 40 years and never touched a computer. Then, a month later, they’re sitting there and running with it. They’re using it because they find they’re getting more time to spend with the residents. Rather than chasing their tails, writing everything down. That’s something we push from the off to say, ‘using Nourish, you’re going to end up having more time to spend time the residents’. That’s what we want at the end of the day.”