Posts

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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Success Leaves Clues

Success leaves clues but often these aren’t being picked up so you miss the learning and miss the opportunity to recognise growth or gain continuous improvement in your audits.

In residential care, HealthCert (MoH) Certification processes appear solely to promote a goal of verifying compliance with requirements. Looking deeper however, the goal of meeting requirements ensures the protection and support of those in your care. This can then be evidenced in a way that’s reflective of service received as meaningful, safe and appropriate by individual residents.

It’s no longer an expectation that you’ll have a number of partial attainments as a result of an external audit. The expectation is full compliance and showing evidence of continuous improvement, going over and above the base ‘pass-mark’ brings you into line with your high performing peers. I’ve heard managers say “but it’s the Auditors job to find things wrong so we expect to get partial attainments.”  That is out-dated thinking and doesn’t fit the current audit and compliance environment or continuous improvement philosophy.

Systems can’t be implemented to show compliance, if staff are not looking at policies and procedures, or using them to guide services and care of residents. If individual staff or managers do what they think best, based on previous experience, without verifying whether that practice is still appropriate or best practice, they do themselves and residents a disservice.

Success leaves clues.  It’s apparent when quality systems are implemented, outcomes are checked in a measurable way, recorded, examined, analysed and greater gains identified for future implementation.  This is a cycle and if you have the right tools to record your continuous improvement projects on, you too will be in the elite who are out-performing those who continue to have multiple partial attainments (deficits) in audit.   Don’t be a provider that looks at others saying it’s ok for them; they have this or that or the other reason for their success but we don’t have those things so we can’t achieve.  Don’t make others extraordinary to let yourself off the hook.  You can have, and deserve to have, all the recognition for the amazing work you perform just like others who are achieving four years.

The lack of a robust up to date quality system, along with deficits in implementation, will lead you down an expensive compliance track. Expensive in loss of reputation as audits are published and accessed online by the public, expensive in loss of time trying to figure things out yourself, increased risk to residents, loss of financial resources as you end up being audited more often than would have otherwise been necessary. The better you achieve at audit, the longer your period of certification, the less often you are audited and therefore less often you’re paying auditors fees!

A common failing in the care facilities under Temporary Management has been from the lack of a proven quality system and application of that system into service provision. I’ve been contracted into a number of sites as a Temporary Manager over the years and this has consistently been the case.

If you would like a free Continuous Improvement Project template to help you identify and record your success, contact us and we’ll email it to you.

Go here to read testimonials from a few of our clients.

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Electronic records and computer use in residential care facilities

I remember years and years ago hearing about the coming of the paperless society!  Do you recall that?  Have we achieved it?  If anything, we’re surrounded by more and more paperwork.  I receive enquiries on a regular basis from disgruntled nurses that are bogged down in paperwork and wanting to know if there is a simpler way to do things that will allow them time to get back to hands-on nursing; spending time with their residents.

I’m more than happy to help you with freeing up your time and still achieve all the necessities of documenting service provision.  One way to do this is using smart computer software.  I realise that up until recently our industry has not been ready for this however with the surge in uses of Facebook and other social networking sites, computers are not as intimidating as they once were!

I’m committed to getting your nurses back on the floor while working on the basis of continuous improvement and providing excellence in care based on evidence based practice.  In order to help me develop the tools you need I’d appreciate you taking a few minutes to complete this quick and simple survey.

Complete the survey HERE

Thank you for your time and look forward to getting a solution that will allow you to get out of the office and back to your residents!

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