Care and support come in many forms. A tapestry of individual threads, rich in the colours of the dreams and ambitions in each community. St Anne’s Community Services understands this potential, as they provide a range of services unified by a single vision. To live a life without limits, by making a difference every day. Their commitment to this vision is what makes them one of the North of England’s leading charities.
Their support covers a wide range of areas, including nursing, care for people with learning disabilities, physical disabilities, homelessness, substance use, alcohol detox, safe spaces for women and mental health services. This support primarily takes the form of outreach day services, emergency accommodation, supported living and residential services. All underpinned by their philosophy to try to reduce any limits they can in terms of people doing what they want to do with their lives.
St Anne’s know they need to evolve with the needs of their community to achieve their vision. That’s why they are launching a new strategy for supporting lives without limits. Having chosen Nourish Care as their digital partner over a year ago, they were well acquainted with our approach to care and support technology. That’s why when looking for a system to help them with their incident management, they chose Nourish Safety. We spoke with their Director of Operations, Lyndsay Atkinson-Swales, about their new strategy, why they chose Nourish Safety, and how their rollout progressed.
In this Nourish Safety case study, we discuss:
Looking to the future
The two key focuses of St Anne’s new approach
Championing people
Lyndsay explains why St Anne’s chose Nourish Safety as part of building their new systems approach and move away from disjointed workarounds
All on board
How St Anne’s used ‘nudge theory’ to help their team understand and utilise the benefits of Nourish Safety
Ease of use, excellence of impact
The benefits of Nourish Safety being felt across St Anne’s teams
Data-driven decisions
How Nourish Safety helps surface important information, and inform more effective support
The future
Why St Anne’s are so excited about what’s still to come
Can you talk us through your new approach to helping people live lives without limits?
“Absolutely, there are two main things we’re working on. The first is trauma-informed care. We want our teams to understand, not what’s wrong with people, but what’s happened to them. Their ‘why’. Why they may communicate, respond or behave in a certain way. We’re trying to focus less on risk assessing and more on safety planning in terms of risk assessment in itself.
“If I said to you, ‘I’m going to do a risk assessment on you’, you might think: ‘Of what? What am I a risk to?’ It’s not the kind of terminology that you’d want to take into a modern social care world. But if I said, ‘Should we create a safety plan so we can support you to remain safe?’ That’s a different conversation. It’s a different way of approaching care and support.
“The other avenue we’re going down in our new approach is co-production. Which is something that’s been around forever. But doing it well. What we don’t ever capture is the ‘why?’. The outcome really is the ‘why?’. Why does that person want to do that? There’ll be practical reasons why, there’ll be emotional and psychological reasons why.
“But we can shy away from that in social care, especially in care planning. We can become too prescriptive. We want to understand context better, and that means making better observations and understanding the ‘why?’ behind people’s actions and goals.”
Why did you choose Nourish Safety to help you achieve this ambition?
“Nourish Safety is a big part of our approach because it factors into our new operating model. We want to move away from the registered manager being the be all end all of responsibility and accountability. Don’t get me wrong, they are, but in social care we always see roles and responsibilities bleed into each other.
“One of the drives behind my role as our director, and why I wanted to bring Nourish Safety in is because I’m always asking: ‘How can I make it as easy as possible for the managers to run their services? I don’t really want them to be registered managers. What I want them to be is quality of life delivery managers.
“I don’t want them to be focused completely on governance and compliance. Yes, that keeps people safe, but it also settles for just letting people exist. I want them to have as much time as they possibly can to teach the staff how to coach, mentor and enable the people we support. If they’re just running around with audits doing compliance, it can lead to focusing on the wrong things. Then their job becomes very task-focused, instead of people-focused.
“Nourish Safety helps with our processes and helps keep our team on track with what they need to do. While allowing them to also use the flows and the information to do that learning piece in a way we haven’t been able to before. Previously, we were using a mix of Excel sheets and online documents. Having it all in one easy-to-action place is a game-changer.”
How did your previous experience with Nourish influence your decision?
“A big factor for us is the way Safety is embedded in Better Care. All of this functionality being in one system is a huge benefit. No one is scrabbling around to find the information they need. A system is a big part of a culture, isn’t it? We’ve all used systems where we think, ‘Goodness, this is frustrating’. When we brought in Nourish Better Care our team adapted to it quickly.
“We started with a big project group of over 30 people. Managers who could become Nourish champions within our service. They taught all their peers, which made it a very organic rollout. We took the same approach with Nourish Safety.
“When I introduced the idea of Nourish Safety, it was before I’d even made a business case for it. I went through the system with each of our management teams to ensure engagement. We made sure we wanted the system, that we knew how it would help us.
“Our managers really bought into the potential of Nourish Safety. It’s a system where we can document everything we need in one place. It’s in specific flows that we can match to our new strategy. It makes admin simple and gives us more time to focus on what matters to us. Once our managers saw Nourish Safety, they became a big driver for its adoption!”
How has your rollout of Nourish Safety gone?
“It was quite straightforward; config only took us about 3-4 weeks. We went live across 150 locations on the same day, talk about a big bang!
“It’s been very easy because we got everybody on board. I know it sounds a bit cliché, but they genuinely are. We focus on the positive impact and elevating them.
“From the beginning, we explained how Nourish Safety is something that will completely help you in your roles and here’s why. If you explain something to somebody in context and how it’ll benefit them, it’s a lot easier for them to get on board.
“It’s our application of nudge theory. We know no one reads blanket emails; it’s simply not an effective way for us to reach our frontline roles. That’s not the arena they operate in. Instead, we cascade information through people.
“We did webinars. I went to managers meetings to go through it with them. We explored the flows and what we needed to record. I gathered feedback from the managers and made sure everyone knows this is a very much a system for operations.
“As an operations team, we haven’t owned a system before. So, we’re really embracing that and embedding it into our culture. Which means on every single visit there’s a question on how we use Nourish.
“‘How are you using Nourish Safety?’ ‘Is there anything we can help you with?’ They all come back to me. I take them to the Nourish project lead. She goes straight back to the service and completes that loop. We want to give feedback so our managers know that anything they’re bringing to us, we act on straightaway. It’s just continual like that, really. It’s a continual conversation.”
Can you give us an example of this continuous improvement in action?
“I was recently visiting a St Anne’s service. A new hire was making notes on his device, so I asked him to show me his workflow. He wasn’t following the correct flow, so I offered to show him the right way. It took about two minutes to go through it.
“He did a test and it went perfectly. He was delighted with the success, and I went around to all the other team members in that service. It took me about 15 minutes and by the time I’d left, everyone is using it. I put together a quick case study with some screenshots and sent it to all our employees.
“We received really positive feedback in response. It’s that nudge approach. It’s got to be through many different methods to ensure you’re reaching everyone in a way that resonates. To do that you’ve got to be all on the same page. That’s something Nourish Safety really helps us achieve. It simplifies our workflows and makes it easier for us to share best practise. All of which support our vision of getting people to live their life without limits.”
How have St Anne’s teams responded to Nourish Safety?
“Our teams found Nourish Safety very easy to use. Once they know that they’ve got to click on that down arrow and go to the incidents it’s simple. Everything flows together between Better Care and Safety. We mapped out our process from the start and that’s key. If you can map out the process simply, people understand and get on board.
“Our support workers really like how quickly they can raise incidents now. The escalations work really well. Which then saves time for our managers on a wider scale by simplifying the whole process.
“The Positive Behavioural Support (PBS) team have got all the information instantly as well, improving our ability to respond to behaviours that challenge. They’re finding it so useful to get to go straight back to managers, instead of waiting for a referral.”
“The more steps I can remove for our managers by using Nourish, the more everyone in our community benefits. It means our managers can spend more time doing what they need to do with their teams, and our teams can more effectively support the people utilising our service to live their lives without limits.”
How does Nourish Safety help you utilise your data more effectively?
“Nourish Safety gives us so much more context. When we were putting data into Power BI for our previous incident reports, it was difficult for us to see it on a personal level. Whereas with the current dashboards, especially the behavioural ones, we’ve been able to very quickly identify factors that we hadn’t identified through our previous data polls. The dashboards are more intuitive, and you can see things from different perspectives depending on your filters.
“Now we can quickly notice trends and respond to them. For example, one person we work with has a lot of ligature incidents, which can be quite distressing. Through the prompts from Nourish Safety and the workflow, we’ve been able to see a pattern emerging in their actions. This enabled us to establish better communication with their Multi Disciplinary Team (MDT). We have more detailed information, and can share it with them quicker, which improves the treatment the person using our service receives. We’re seeing these incidents reduce as a result and that is a positive experience for everybody.
“We can access information and share it quicker because of how the escalations work in Nourish Safety. The detail and workflow are game changing. With the email pulling through the escalation, the severity and the incident type. Then filtering it to the relevant levels of the organisation and departments, our people were able to coordinate our approach quicker.
“Prior to Nourish Safety that person was on about 120 incidents of ligature a month. Last time I checked the dashboard that had come down to 30. Which is an incredible development on their journey to living a life without limits.”
What are Nourish like as a digital partner for St Anne’s Community Care?
“Excellent, I couldn’t ask for more. I think it doesn’t matter who I interact with at Nourish, I always feel that you all believe in your vision and that’s important for me. It feels to me that what you say you’re doing, you’re actually doing. We helped build Nourish Safety, we can see where you listened to us and applied our feedback. It’s good to work with a partner you can explore things with.
“I’m very excited about our future with Nourish. Whenever I speak to Nourish, or hear people from Nourish at conferences, it’s so refreshing. I love the ideas you have. It’s clear you are pushing for change, you want to help move social care forward and not just rest on your laurels as a company, which is great.
“I love how you build products for the sector. Co-producing them with providers and people with lived experience. I’m feeling quite excited about the possibilities. Really, it feels like the art of the possible rather than ‘that’s good enough’.
“I think social care is used to ‘That’s good enough’, but with Nourish we feel like we can do anything!”
