With the winter months closing in fast, winter planning and how to cope during another potentially snowy period will be coming to the forefront of home carers’ minds. After the difficulties that many home care companies experienced with snow last year, I thought it would be worth blogging about how domiciliary care software can help keep companies running, even in a cold snap, meaning one less thing to worry about in what can be a very stressful time.
Unfortunately, we can’t influence the weather, but we can help to make sure that care is still being provided to more vulnerable customers and that the quality is high, compliant and safe for both the carer and the customer. Keeping the focus on the care being delivered and not on the paperwork.
Poor weather and tricky conditions on the roads can make life extremely difficult for carers to travel to and from work, and for customers to get the same frequency and length of visits if a carer is under weather pressures. Generally, we see that the work can be shared very differently from the usual timetable; where a carer lives or even the car they drive could mean easier access and safer travel routes. Encouragingly, in some cases in more remote areas we have seen carers from other companies share resources with each other on a temporary basis.
This mix up of care can be very difficult to track and although the point of care will still be of a high standard, recording, auditing and compliance can sometimes be neglected when using paper. Using a digital system can help maintain high standards of compliance automatically so the focus is simply making sure the customer is being seen and is safe when the weather is cold. This helps prevent both the customer and the care team from feeling stranded and emotionally low as a result.
So how can domiciliary care software help? Using domiciliary care software, makes sharing out and assigning visits simpler and the information provided is clear and easy to enter. If carers are seeing customers that are not on the usual runs, accessing the activities, what to do and the specifics of how to perform the activity is simple and easy.
Having access to real-time information means that head office knows when the customer has been seen and is safe. Most importantly, having a digital system means that you don’t have to wait for the weather to clear to allow access to the paperwork in the customer’s home and then for the care manager to audit the information and discover any potential issues. Domiciliary care software makes it quick and easy to amend the care plan or alert you in real-time if anything critical has been missed rather than waiting for the issues to be discovered further down the road.
Ease of access to information for carers is crucial to allow unfamiliar carers to see what needs to be done, and how, with as little time delay as possible, especially if call times need to be changed. Allowing and changing access for carers is very simple to do with a digital system. So, if you have anybody using a system temporarily you can grant access to select customers for a limited period of time in accordance with GDPR guidelines.
The focus of domiciliary care software is simply to make sure everything can run as smoothly as possible and that care companies know that they are being easily compliant as a minimum rather than worrying about the organisation or filing of their paper care records.
By Dominik Soanes
