The Lawns Care & Nursing home in Worcestershire is a 62-bed care home in the Heritage group offering both residential care and specialist nursing care, all in a warm and friendly environment.

The home has recently been extended and renovated throughout and has been recognised for a number of awards including the coveted Platinum Status of the Gold Standards Framework Award.

Background

Melanie Dawson, Registered Manager at The Lawns has dedicated her entire career to care. Starting her nurse training at 18, she worked in complex care before becoming a home manager. Always curious about technology, she’s always been keen to find systems that streamline workflows and improve outcomes.

Streamlining the alerts for their nurse call system and accessing insights from the nurse call activity was an area where manager Melanie felt the home and residents could really benefit. Having tried a solution from one provider that didn’t deliver the efficiencies and data they required, The Lawns selected NexusCare nursecall messaging and reporting by GHM Communications and haven’t looked back since.

Melanie says: “One of the things the CQC are keen to see is that a home is using technology to enhance the care that we’re delivering.  When it comes to nurse call systems, if somebody’s using their call bell, that typically means that carers are reacting to a care need.  Unless you know if there’s a pattern to those needs it’s really difficult to proactively manage to meet them.”

The Solution

NexusCare delivers nurse call alerts directly to the mobile devices of care staff at The Lawns. All of their nurse call data is also recorded in a central dashboard ready for customised reporting and analysis. Finally, NexusCare integrates with their PCS digital care platform to automatically record nurse call activity on resident timelines.

Using nurse call data to improve outcomes

“We use NexusCare to look for patterns in our call bell behaviour. We can pre-empt that need or behaviour by putting the right level of care in place. For example, if you know that somebody gets up to the toilet at 2:00 AM every morning, then instead of waiting for them to ring the bell for the carer to attend, we can simply schedule their care call in at 10 minutes to 2. No call bell. No care staff rushing around reactively. And increased customer satisfaction, our residents are our customers.

“Another pattern that we highlighted using NexusCare was that our peak bell time was 8:00 AM, this is when day staff team were coming on duty and taking the handover from the night staff – a really busy and important time for homes.
So we have been able to simply alter the start time of our day shift.

“Not only have we changed the start time to our working day, but we also changed staffing in the evening. We now have an extra member of staff across the end of our day shift and the beginning of our night shift. It’s not necessarily extra staffing, it’s just smarter staffing and using my budget in a smarter way.

“This also really ticks the box for the CQC because I can show that by analysing the data, this is what we saw and this is what we’ve done in response to the information.”

“When we do our review of our residents every 28 days, we can go into NexusCare and analyse the data to see whether or not their call rate this month has been more or less than last month. If we identify somebody that was a regular call bell user but then this has changed, we can start to look at why that’s happening. It could be because that person might have changed in their ability and we need to change how we are managing and monitoring that person in relation to their care needs such as more regular physical checks.”

Setting Service Level Agreements for responsiveness

“What’s also really good about NexusCare is that I can set a Service Level Agreement of how quickly I would expect our care staff to respond to a call. If that SLA is ever not met, it would get highlighted to me as a manager so that I can analyse the data to understand if my staffing is correct, is my staff to resident ratio and dependency are right and whether I’m generally managing the home in the right way.”

Monitoring care staff activity

“NexusCare lets me look at the response times and activity of each member of staff. I can see if it’s the same team members taking the majority of calls or identify any specific training needs of others. I can ensure there’s good teamwork across shifts and manage my team more effectively.”

Customised reporting that saves time and supports the CQC

NexusCare can be configured to automatically create and deliver a wide range of nurse call reports.

“I’ve set up a daily report as a useful overview, but I also run a monthly report for my more complex care plan audits. The audit allows me to answer questions around responsiveness and if we’re meeting our SLAs and KPIs – another requirement of the CQC.

“Whilst our nurse call system has its own reporting system, it doesn’t allow you to personalise the way the reports are created and viewed. Before NexusCare I had to extract and sort the data. You need to be really good at using Excel and formulas, it took ages to produce a very average report. NexusCare sorts the data before I even get started. Using NexusCare I probably save myself 4 hours on each and every report, and it’s so much more accurate.”

Silencing alerts around the home

Because NexusCare delivers nurse call alerts directly to mobile devices, there is no more noisy ringing from a central wall board.

“It’s the comments that you get from families that makes you realise how much quieter the home is now. I’ve just done a viewing and out of the six homes they’ve viewed, they said it is significantly different here based on the noise level form call bells alone.

You’re not hearing this constant bell ringing all the time. Our residents, especially residents with dementia, are less unsettled because they’re not being triggered by a noise that they think they need to respond to or can’t control.  It’s a nice, quiet, settled environment 24hrs a day.

Staff can also ignore a physical call bell or become blind to it, but when the alert is on their handset, they have to make an instantaneous decision.”

Integrating nurse call data with resident care plans

“Because NexusCare integrates with our care planning system, every call bell triggers a care note into a residents file. It brings both resident led activity and staff led activity together for the first time.

“And if families ask how often their loved one rings or how quickly we’re responding, we can share the care notes with them in great detail. It’s time stamped evidence.”

Onboarding and support by GHM Care

It was the easiest installation of any bit of technology that we’ve ever used, from my initial enquiry to tailoring that installation to our existing technology.  The engineers that installed and set it up were really great. They were very flexible in helping the staff to understand how the system works and how to use it.  If I’ve got anything that I need to speak to somebody about, I send a ticket in and away we go. The support team is really responsive and they talk to me in a language that I understand. They also help us to analyse and understand the data that we can now access.

“When I go back and compare response times from before we started using NexusCare, it’s amazing how much we’ve reduced response times, sustainably. We’ve come an awful long way since we’ve had NexusCare in place.”