User Review of GHM Care’s Nexus Implementation at Swansea care home

The GHM Care Team have recently been working on a project for Hillside Care Home, a nursing and residential care home with 58 residents in South Wales. Part of the project is installing our Nexus Care Platform, a messaging platform that sends nursecall alarms and alerts directly to mobile phones so noisy consoles can be silenced.

Gareth the Director at Hillside Care Home has kindly shared his first thoughts.

“A good care home must be, first and foremost…a home. People live within the home’s environment day-in and day-out, indeed, spending almost their entire lives within the confines of the care home itself (besides the odd trip if they are able). Now imagine, living within that environment and having the continual drone of nurse call alarms; day and night; ceaseless; 24 hours a day; 7 days a week.

“Even if the volume’s turned down at night, because it’s quieter or you’re nearly asleep you can still hear their continual drone (…I know, as I’ve slept in the care home on many a night). Then perhaps compound that frustration with dementia or confusion, and you hear this incessant sound that you can’t understand but feel irritated by… ‘Is it a door? Is it the phone? Why doesn’t someone answer it?’

“Hillside prides itself on being a good quality home that I’ve now run for some 15 years. We were the first home in Wales to be registered under the Eden Alternative, an approach to care that aims to address the three plagues of care home life:  Loneliness, helplessness and boredom.  We reached the finals of the Nationwide Pinders Design Awards and have an excellent reputation locally.

“However, for 15 years I’ve failed to find an acceptable solution that could run effectively and silently; that would have the rigorous coverage that you must have with a Nurse Call solution. However, implementing Nexus on top of the Intercall System has finally enabled me to achieve my nirvana… silencing the Nurse Call Bells.

“For the first time, all is now calm. We finally don’t sound, and hence inadvertently feel, like an institution anymore. As you walk around the home it now feels peaceful and like I’ve always intended a home should be a community where people are simply living their lives and we happen to work and care for them.

“What I am surprised about is that it is so much more pervasive than I realised. In fact, until they were silenced, I had not appreciated just how intrusive the Nurse Call bells were; but now I continue to notice the lack of institutionalisation and the newfound calmness & peacefulness on an ongoing and daily basis.”

To discuss Nexus Care or other care home technology that we provide, please contact us on 01865 367111.