An interview with Anita Astle, MBE, Managing Director of Wren Hall Nursing Home.
Tell me a bit about yourself and the team at Wren Hall
I am the Managing Director of Wren Hall Nursing Home, a 53-bedded nursing home in Selston, Nottinghamshire, which supports frail older people with complex needs and dementia. Wren Hall is rated outstanding by CQC.
What challenges do you face as the manager and owner of Wren Hall?
We have to provide information that is sometimes conflicting to lots of different organisations, such as CQC, local authorities etc. It can be challenging to meet every organisation’s requirements for information, while also delivering the support required to our ladies and gents.
As a registered nurse I understand the pressures on our registered nurses and care staff to maintain factually accurate records. As the managing director it is my responsibility to ensure care and nursing staff have appropriate care evidencing and care planning tools that are comprehensive and easy to use. My challenge is to find ways to free up team members from documentation, so they can be with our ladies and gents and still capture factually accurate and comprehensive records.
How has technology helped Wren Hall to free up staff time?
The use of technology has been key to time management and freeing up staff time. We first started using technology in 1991 to have computerised care plans, so we’ve been benefiting from technology for nearly 30 years!
We implemented Person Centred Software’s Mobile Care Monitoring (MCM) system last year. Now all care and nursing staff carry handheld tablets, so they can record information quickly and easily and evidence care in real time. Staff embraced MCM and feel that it has made their working lives so much easier.
What does Mobile Care Monitoring (MCM) give you that your previous solution wasn’t able to?
We replaced our previous care planning software as our administration team were spending too much time analysing records to extract meaningful data. The previous system required staff to enter lots of text, which was only realistically able to be done at the end of their shift.
Now staff can quickly record care when it is happening with MCM as the recording side of the system is icon-driven. It automatically feeds into all the management reports and charts that we need. We have access to so much data that we didn’t previously have. We can see what is happening to each of our ladies and gents minute by minute. We can track their planned care and capture when planned care has not been given. All this information helps us to improve their quality of care, and we can easily share it with organisations that require it.
We can monitor team performance using the data captured in MCM too. This enables our team leaders to be more effective within their roles as they can recognise poor practice and address any issues promptly.
How does evidencing care using MCM help you to ensure compliance?
MCM gives us accurate, legible and up-to-date records for all organisations that require it quickly and easily. The system also gives us visibility and access to information so that we can ensure compliance at Wren Hall.
My staff and I have up-to-date information, preferences and personalised care plans available electronically at our fingertips throughout the shift. We are equipped with detailed information to make confident decisions to improve our ladies’ and gents’ quality of care.
We’ve never been able to evidence offered care that has been declined or refused on another electronic care system before. But MCM tracks the care delivered and not delivered against the planned care so we can be responsive to people’s changing needs.
See more information about the award we sponsored at the Great British Care Awards and photos from brilliant event at: https://personcentredsoftware.com/gbca18
