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Models of Aged Care Changing

My recent visit to several Hercules Health clients in the lower South Island included a tour of The Hawthorndale Care Village. This site represents a shift from traditional aged care services that have not changed much in over 30 years. This new model focuses on person-centered, normalized living. By aligning with community norms, residents can thrive in an environment that feels familiar.

The Hawthorndale Care Village is a groundbreaking approach to dementia care in New Zealand and is the second facility using this model. The Rotorua Care Village was the first aged care service in New Zealand to adopt this concept, where residents live in smaller individual homes. This model provides freedom and choice for residents with dementia who previously required a ‘secure’ service, which often restricted their personal space.

Inspired by the innovative Dutch care village, De Hogeweyk, we aim to create dementia care that honours each person, supporting them with compassion, dignity and respect by recreating the familiarity and rhythm of everyday life within a safe and secure setting. This mixed model of care (different levels of care within one home) including those with advancing dementia, is an interesting concept for New Zealand aged residential care and I’m interested to see how well this works over time.

Inspired by the innovative Dutch care village, De Hogeweyk, we aim to create dementia care that honours each person, supporting them with compassion, dignity and respect by recreating the familiarity and rhythm of everyday life within a safe and secure setting. This mixed model of care (different levels of care within one home), including those with advancing dementia, is an interesting concept for New Zealand aged residential care and I’m interested to see how well this works over time.

The needs of aged care for tomorrow and the days after, will not be met by doing what was done yesterday and the days prior! I applaud the teams at The Care Village in Rotorua, and The Hawthorndale Care Village in Invercargill for having the vision and commitment to try something differently.

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Testimonial – Generus Living

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Testimonial – Rawhiti Estate

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Why use Hercules Health for your policies and procedures?

Testimonial

Why use Hercules Health for your policies and procedures?

Our previous owners bought templated policies in 2003 and when I joined as the RN, the printed policies were 10 years old, while the digital copies were more recent. Most of the time, it felt like we were running the facility on multiple versions of every policy.  And even when we overhauled the whole policy suite in 2017, managing them took a lot of time, money, and effort. We learned that the hard way when COVID policies kept on changing and coming from multiple agencies in 2020.

Since coming on board with Hercules Health, we were able to remove 1 FTE of RN hours because that’s how much time it took keeping up and writing policies ourselves.  Based on RN wages today, that’s savings of approximately $100K

We will forever sing praises of how Hercules continues to be a huge part of our success, both as an organisation and personally, for Elaine, Yana and me, as owners.

Running and owning an aged care facility (and even winning awards) have been far less stressful, thanks to having a one-stop-shop like Hercules Health.

Andrea De Leon

Co-owner

Queen Rose Retirement Home (Dunedin)

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Testimonial – Glenwood Home

As the Interim Clinical Manager at Glenwood Home- a small, standalone facility in rural South Canterbury, I have been assisting the team to transition from one software application to HCSL.

I have used multiple different patient management systems during my many years in Aged Residential Care, some good, some not so good and I have been very impressed with HCSL:

  • The transition to HCSL was extremely smooth- the video guides were extremely helpful in providing the ‘how to’ information.
  • The support team at HCSL have been quick to answer questions and support us through this change
  • We have all found the system to be simple and easy to use, it intuitively guides you through each stage of documentation.
  • The viewing screens are clear, easy to read, not too busy and simple to move from one screen to another.
  • Integration with Medi-Map and interRAI are a huge bonus- and extremely helpful in streamlining documentation.
  • The Wound Management system is clear and easy to follow. All staff have found that creating an adverse event or infection event is straightforward.
  • The Quality & Auditing component for me as a Clinical Manager is fantastic!
  • The policies and procedures & Human Resources sections are also fantastic!
  • As a standalone facility it is reassuring to us that the system complies fully with the Ngā Paerewa Health and Disability Services Standard

Having worked in both standalone facilities and for Corporates in both NZ and Australia, and worked with many different systems, I can honestly recommend HCSL as a system that works extremely well in the Residential Aged Care Setting in NZ- thank you !

Kind regards

Kim Harris

Interim Clinical Manager

Glenwood Home, Timaru

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The coming of age: Aged residential care nursing in Aotearoa New Zealand in the times of COVID-19

The Nursing Leadership Group (NLG) is the recognised voice of aged care nursing. The following article written by the NLG which includes HCSL’s very own Director, Gillian Robinson BN, RN has been published in the Nursing Praxis – Journal of Professional Nursing Special Issue: Nursing response to COVID-19 in Aotearoa New Zealand

The coming of age: Aged residential care nursing in Aotearoa New Zealand in the times of COVID-19

For years aged care nursing has been largely overlooked and marginalised from mainstream healthcare. COVID-19 brought both aged residential care and nursing into sharp focus for Aotearoa New Zealand. This paper provides a commentary on the work of executive nurses within the Nursing Leadership Group of the New Zealand Aged Care Association as COVID-19 spread into some ARC facilities in early 2020 and threatened the health and wellbeing of many residents and nurses. The group influenced the agenda and implementation of policies for Aged Residential Care and brought the voice of nursing and residents of aged care to the forefront at national and regional levels.

CLICK BELOW TO DOWNLOAD THE FULL ARTICLE.

Aged residential care nursing in Aotearoa

Frances Hughes, PhD, RN, Clinical Director, Oceania, Auckland
Anna Blackwell , PGDip, RN, Nursing Director/Owner, Cook Street Nursing Care Centre, Palmerston North
Tanya Bish, MN(Hons), BCom, RN, Clinical Director, Metlife Care, Auckland
Cheyne Chalmers, MMgt, RN, Chief Operating Officer, Ryman Healthcare, Christchurch
Katherine Foulkes, PGDip, RN, Clinical Services Director, Bupa, Auckland
Lynda Irvine, RN, Head of Clinical Services, Summerset Group Holdings Ltd, Auckland
Gillian Robinson, BN, RN, Director, Health Care Compliance Solutions Ltd, Christchurch
Rhonda Sherriff, RN, Managing Director, Chatswood Retirement Village, Christchurch
Virginia Sisson, PGCert, RN, Operations Manager, The Selwyn Foundation, Auckland

Reference:  Hughes, F. A., Blackwell, A., Bish, T., Chalmers, C., Foulkes, K., Irvine, L., Robinson, G., Sherriff, R., & Sisson, V. (2021).  The coming of age: Aged residential care nursing in Aotearoa New Zealand in the times of COVID-19. Nursing Praxis in Aotearoa New Zealand, 37(3), 25-29.

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Moreh Home

Thank you, Gillian, for all your support. The Healthcare Compliance Solutions Ltd (HCSL) aged care program gives a structured clear pathway through the obstacle course of Certification.

The HSCL program was extremely user friendly and appears very nicely laid out and easy to locate care plans and patient’s information. The general feedback from the staff has been positive.

The policies and procedures were easy to follow, and well presented. We appreciated how thorough these policies were, and how much work had gone into developing them.

We all felt well supported throughout, and it was so nice knowing that you were on the end of the phone/email or zoom. Even when we met in person, you were incredibly positive and encouraging, thank you!

We would recommend this system to anyone needing assistance with the challenge that is Certification.

Barbara Adams

Board Chair-person /Acting Manager.

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Bench-marking – Aged Residential Care

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his New Zealand designed web based (on-line / in-the-cloud) Bench-marking and quality management system from Healthcare Compliance Solutionhttp://www.hcslqms.co.nz/s Ltd allows you to:

  • Bench-mark in real-time – specific to resident type, event type, date and time of day.
  • Have automated default reports to save you time analysing your data trends and patterns
  • Drill down into your data easily to identify opportunities for continuous improvement
  • Complete your internal audits online and have the corrective actions auto-populate into a corrective action log
  • Log and manage adverse events
  • Bench-marking of adverse events against other aged care providers
  • Support evidencing an active Health & Safety programme is in place
  • Log and manage infections – automatic outbreak registers
  • Bench-marking of infections against other aged care providers
  • Log and manage your complaints with time-frame, investigation and response prompts
  • Dashboard view options for level of care and any chosen 3 monthly time-frame review
  • Dashboard view option of adverse events or infections
  • Logs (event registers) appear with individual events in one colour when open and change to another colour when the event is closed. This allows you to see quickly the status of events. 
  • Use in conjunction with your current policies / procedures or update to the HCSL site specific created policies and procedures. 

Your organisation policies and procedures and related documents (if created by HCSL) are also accessible through the Facility Documents tab on the left of the screen for remote anytime, anywhere access.  The keyword search option on the policies and procedures in addition to precise indexing and coding of documents makes it very quick and easy to locate information for staff to reference.

You can also upload your own documents for confidential safe storage.

This is what Rhonda Sherriff, NZACA Clinical Advisor says about using the HCSL QA system:

“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 hugely time saving”

To view a brief video explanation of the system click here. This programme has been operating in NZ Aged Care since mid 2016 so now has many thousands of pieces of data to compare yourself against.  

To find out more contact us here.

 

Making monitoring your service remotely in LIVE time easy!

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Quality Management Systems

The below question and answer were published in the New Zealand Aged Care Association industry ‘In-Touch’ newsletter (19th February 2016).

Question: A member asks “if we purchase a comprehensive quality management system from a provider how assured are we that the system will meet full compliance, come certification and surveillance audit time, as requirements and compliance expectations change frequently?

NZACA Clinical Advisor Answer: “You should be purchasing a complete quality management system that will comply with the Health and Disability Standards specifications, health and safety requirements and meet DHB/ARRC contractual requirements.

The provider of the system would normally initially tailor the full quality management package to reflect accurately the site specifications, H.R. component, and best practice guidelines, after consultation with the owner and management on site. These documents need to be site specific. The provider will normally contract to the site, which sets out obligations between the provider and the site management.

The contract will include the full review and updates of policies and procedures on a bi-annual basis, unless specified more frequently, to keep documents accurate and reflective of best practice. There may be an educational element provided within the contract as well, to benefit staff knowledge and skills. There is normally a good document control system in place and cross referencing of information where required.

Quality management systems are reliant on the skills and knowledge of the site personnel working with them, the way the system is managed and the outcomes/reviews, content and information extricated from the use of the system to improve quality care provision/outputs. The documentation system is reflective of the people using them, and the depth to which documentation and information is created, analysed and utilised for improvements.

Auditors on site rely on the provision of robust up-to-date policies and site adherence to them. Partial attainments can sometimes result from staff deviating from, or not following, their sites actual policies or processes as outlined in their quality management system.”

Where can you get such a system? 

Here at Healthcare Compliance Solutions Ltd we provide the services described above and noted as being optimal for achieving excellence in care and audit outcomes.   To see a brief video about the Aged Care software update and now in use by over 3,800 users in NZ, click here. 

Request a no obligation consultation here.  

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