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Guiding Aged Care Towards Proactive, Personalised Resident Care

In aged care, meeting the evolving needs of residents requires more than responding when issues arise. At Hercules Health, the focus is on proactive care, empowering aged care providers to anticipate needs, personalise support, and deliver better outcomes for every resident.

Moving from Reactive to Proactive Care
Traditional models of care often rely on reacting to incidents or changes after they occur. Hercules Health supports aged care clients to shift this approach by using live, real-time data to continuously review residents’ wellbeing. This allows care teams to identify early indicators of change and intervene sooner, improving both resident safety and quality of life.

Personalised Care at the Individual Level
Every resident is unique. Hercules Health enables providers to observe trends and patterns at an individual resident level, supporting personalised care planning that adapts as needs change. By analysing data over time, care teams gain deeper insight into each resident’s physical, emotional, and clinical requirements, ensuring care is truly person‑centred.

Visibility Across the Entire Site
While individual care is critical, aged care organisations also need a clear view across their entire facility. Hercules Health delivers site-wide visibility, helping leaders and clinical teams understand broader patterns, risks, and opportunities for improvement. This balanced view supports better decision-making, resource allocation, and compliance with care standards.

Changing the Way Aged Care Is Delivered
By combining live data, predictive insights, and clear visibility, Hercules Health is helping aged care providers transform how care is delivered. The result is a more responsive, informed, and compassionate model of care, one that supports staff, reassures families, and most importantly, enhances the wellbeing of residents.

Through proactive guidance and intelligent insights, Hercules Health partners with aged care clients to meet today’s needs while preparing for tomorrow’s challenges.

Aldwins House (Promisia Healthcare) Facility Manager Debbie, keeping aware of trends in real time through Hercules Health Dashboards.
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Productivity in Healthcare

How is productivity measured in Healthcare? 

Aged care provides Healthcare for a growing population, with often an intense pressure to provide a person-centered focus for those who may or may not be able to express their own needs. Providing meaningful compassionate care in such situations reinforces the need for patience while each team member is under pressure to provide more care for more people with increasingly complex needs.

Digital systems which are fit for purpose and intuitive to use, are important as essential tools at the crossroads of time-poor aged care service teams and meeting the complex and often unstable clinical needs of those in their care.

Hercules Health INSIGHTS Dashboards are receiving strong endorsement from those using them. Not only do these Dashboards reflect health status of resident cohorts across a whole service, they also reflect areas of potential clinical risk and support workforce planning. They show where and when care team members are needed to align with the fluctuations in health presentation of residents in aged residential care. 

Displaying clinical data in a way that shows clinical care needs is simply one of the tools we support our clients with to be more productive and more effective. I think back to my days nursing on the wards in acute settings, or leading care teams in aged resudential care and marvel at what we can now achieve by bringing relevant data to guide care into this series of Dashboards.

The fun is also in exploring what else we can create to support this  sector. Watch this space!!

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Data informed change

Debbie, prioritizing action based on data

I had the pleasure of discussion with two senior team members at an Aged Care service yesterday about the desire for multiple change. Their change program had been making good progress but then stalled. The halt seemed to relate to the belief that all education had to happen, classroom style before a change could be commenced. 

Instead of applying a vast amount of theory, waiting to confirm it was all understood, I suggested looking at the data. Aged Care lack the luxury of time to fully educate while clinical risk is waiting to be addressed, growing by the day.

When looking at data, where is your highest risk? Is it falls? Is it unintentional weight loss? Is it dehydration? Is it behaviors of concern? Is it pressure injuries? With so many options for action, tracking and visibility via live dashboards will help drive meaningful action and support prioritizing highest risk first.

Targeted education on 2 or 3 things at most supports progress being achieved quickly. One suggestion is educate as you go. Keep viewing the related data to determine success of actions. Study, act, review is a shortened version of the well known quality repeating cycle of Plan, do, check, act..

If we work on 50 things that all need improvement simultaneously, the chance of progress and rapid risk mitigation is diluted.

Debbie, the Facility Manager from another site knows this. At Aldwins House, Promisia Group, they are making great use of the Hercules Health LIVE time dashboards to closely monitor clinical data to drive excellence in care.

With around 660 aged care services in New Zealand, every site operates differently but one thing remains true, when they use data to inform care, they reduce risk and improve health outcomes for their residents. Hercules Health dashboards are bespoke to reflect each site and their particular needs.

#agedcare #dha #digitalhealth

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New Feature – Tracking Social & Hospital Leave

With Covid at record numbers in the country, it has increasingly become essential to track your residents movements and days in and out of your facility, for either for Hospital Visits or Social leave.

As a result we have added a new tracking feature to help you record this for all of your residents and include this in our running We’ve deployed into the LIVE system the first of the changes for tracking additional information to help support invoicing.

This came out of feedback from a number of our clients who have expressed a real need for this

Social leave

This new feature can be found It’s in the resident details page of the resident profile and supports the tracking of any time where the resident is Absent in hospital or out on Social Leave.

It will also show on the resident log if resident are SL (on social leave) or AH (Absent in hospital) and will also auto populate in the evacuation register in HCSL.

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End of Life Choice Act implementation – 7th Nov 2021

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End Of Life Choice Act HCSL

As you will be aware, assisted dying will be legally available in New Zealand from November 7 when the End-of-Life Choice Act 2019 comes into effect.

The introduction of assisted dying means that a person with a terminal illness who meets the eligibility criteria can request medication to relieve their suffering and end their life.

The Act sets out the legal framework and a high-level process for accessing assisted dying, including strict eligibility criteria and safeguards.

Assisted dying is not a replacement for palliative care or health care services more generally. It provides another option for people with a terminal illness in certain circumstances.

Assisted dying remains illegal until 7 November 2021.  The Ministry of Health will be responsible for the Act and has an implementation programme underway to implement the assisted dying service.

This may impact hospitals, care facilities and retirement villages across the country in an entirely new way, so we at Healthcare Compliance Solutions Ltd have been following the Ministry of Health’s guidance along the way, to ensure our policies and procedures help our new and existing clients through the process, as best as possible.

If you would like to learn more about how Healthcare Compliance Solutions can help you and your orgnisation.



Contact Us

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HCSL Newsletter – October 2021

HCSL Oct 21 Newsletter
CLICK TO VIEW THE FULL NEWSLETTER
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Alexander House

Alexander Rest Home

“HCSL has been incredibly easy to navigate since we went live on the system on the 1st of October. Our team have people with varying levels of technology literacy and the ease of this system has meant that staff are more confident to use technology and see how it can help to improve time management by not having to double or triple up on written documentation.”

Manager

Alexander House Rest Home

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Rhonda Sherriff

Rhonda Sherrif

I am very happy to endorse your system as the information is invaluable for CNMs to analyse the data/information and make informed decisions on best practice and innovation to decrease hazards, improve outcomes, and mitigating factors for resident welfare. I’m pleased you are delving into the data to the level you are, as it’s time saving for sites in many respects, and so easy to dice and slice the information to get the trends.

CNM’s used to spend hours just writing up the collective information before the analysis, so this system is hugely time saving.

Rhonda Sherriff – Owner Chatswood Retirement Village

Clinical Advisor for NZ Aged Care Association

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Bethsaida Retirement Village

Tracy

We are very pleased to have recently been granted 4 year MOH Certification! No corrective actions and three Continuous Improvements.

This follows on from a fully attained Partial Provisional Audit that was required prior to opening our two new wings earlier this year with no corrective actions.

Make no mistake! HCSL policies, software and support have played a major part in these accomplishments. The HCSL software we use means we have easy access to information in real time.

I started working with Gillian of HCSL shortly after I took on the role of Facility Nurse Manager at Bethsaida Retirement Village six years ago. The facility was not using Healthcare Compliance Solutions policies at the time and perhaps this was reflected in the previous audit results.

Gillian is always responsive to emails and phone calls which is critical when timely advice is required.

The HCSL regular newsletters are interesting with relevant and up to date information on issues affecting aged care.

Gillian is a lovely person to deal with. She is thoughtful, professional, pragmatic and I have always found her to be keen to help, with practical advice on any issues that might arise in the management of a retirement facility.

I thoroughly recommend HCSL to all aged care facilities.

Tracy Holdaway (RN BN)

Facility Nurse Manager

Bethsaida Retirement Village

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Nurse Consultant

Nurse consultant Healthcare Compliance Solutions Ltd

As a RN, Facility Manager and Consultant in Aged Care I have used various Aged Care software packages over the years.

Feedback I have received from RNs and caregivers using HCSL system includes the following:

  • Takes less time to find information about residents
  • More resident focused and less task focused than using tick box task lists.
  • Able to edit information quickly.
  • Easy to upload and save information in the documents folder.
  • Easier to do monthly quality analysis as the information is quicker to find.

I am very impressed with HCSL software as I have found it delivers in the following ways and is:

  • Intuitive  and timesaving – the software prompts the operator – for example to create a short term care plan if documenting an  adverse event  such as wound care. The one click action means less time taken trying to open a new screen or change functions such as finding care plans or progress notes.
  • Quality Assurance is able to be maintained in a timely and comprehensive manner with an internal audit system and corrective action logs in addition to monthly analysis of adverse events and infections.
  • NZ ARC compliance requirements are continuously updated – in care

planning, and resident information requirements documentation and procedures and policies in the individualised  Facility  Documentation library.

  • Very responsive service- the  HCSL team quickly respond to questions and  seek and use client feedback to continuously develop and extend the software capabilities. HCSL is   New Zealand based so information is relevant to nursing and care giving in New Zealand.
  • Developed and managed by a very experienced NZ Nursing leader in aged care who has comprehensive knowledge of and experience in quality and compliance systems in NZ aged care.

Anne Sheard, RN.

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