Handsale Care Home Group improves staff retention rates by 40% for carers and 33% for nurses since adopting the Mobile Care Monitoring system from Person Centred Software – with nursing staff gaining up to four hours a day to nurse, rather than do paperwork.
Handsale adopted Mobile Care Monitoring to improve the efficiency and communication across its eight UK homes, which will soon include a ninth home currently under construction outside of Edinburgh. Founded in 1988, the company employs around 700 people, all of whom provide its 500 residents with friendly, personal and compassionate care.
Rishi Sodha, Care Director of Handsale says, “We are delighted with our latest staff retention figures. The time saved compared to doing paper charts and records has meant staff can spend more time with residents – which is exactly why they got in the job in the first place.
“Our nurses are saving up to 4 hours a day and the care staff between 45 minutes to an hour. I hear many homes complain about lack of staff but if a nurse can save four hours, it’s like having another staff member for a third of a shift.
Rishi adds, “Our staff feel more secure in the knowledge that what they’re doing is being recorded accurately and in much more depth when compared to paper. I’m delighted to say that professional and regulatory partners have credited us with having some of the best and most person-centred care plans in the industry.”
Care home staff use the icon-based application on a handheld device throughout their shift. It is easy to use, fast, and icon driven with limited need for typing – ensuring the quality of information is both accurate and detailed and most importantly, freeing up time to do the actual caring. It is ideal for non-native speakers of English, those with dyslexia and non-IT literate people.
Mobile Care Monitoring is currently used by over 30,000 carers and nurses who jointly record two million care notes every day. The results:
- Enhances care – the accurate recording of fluids consumed by residents leads to a 33% reduction in falls and UTIs. The amount of tea evidenced in one year is equal to 1.4 Olympic swimming pools.
- Saves time by reducing paperwork – the mobile software enables each carer to save at least three days a month on administration, compared to paper systems.
- The paper saved equated to over 8 trees every day. This represents a saving in archived storage space equivalent to 850 sea containers since the company started five years ago.
- Ease of use is critical to success with 85% of care homes only requiring one day of training to go live with Mobile Care Monitoring.
- 94% of CQC inspected homes using Mobile Care Monitoring are rated Good or Outstanding.
Jonathan Papworth, co-founder and director of Person Centred Software says, “Health and social care have been notoriously slow to move away from paper-based documentation. Even care providers that adopted desktop computers, care staff would still write up everything using words at the end of their shift; words which were subject to interpretation, were inconsistent and unmeasurable. The use of desktop computers also delivered minimal time savings since staff had to walk back and forth to a device throughout the day to record care.
“It became apparent to us that whilst administration software helps care providers’ efficiency, it doesn’t actually help those delivering care. Social care really only exists because of these people, so we decided to focus on improving the lives of the care staff users. All this added together makes a unique solution to a very simple objective: to improve the life of everyone involved in social care.”
