Overwhelmed by the demand for Evidence for your Home Care Visits? Here’s a solution.

We all know that when it comes to the property market, it’s all about Location, Location, and Location and similarly, in domiciliary care, it is debated that it's all about Evidence, Evidence, and more Evidence.

Every Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection is primarily an Evidence-gathering exercise. Speaking to one inspector and CQC Specialist Advisor (SpA), I was told that “if it isn’t written down then it never happened”. That’s the stark reality of running a domiciliary care agency today. It can be overwhelming.

Every action or inaction on the part of your Support Workers needs to be justified:

• What did they do?
• When did they do it?
• Where did they do it?
• How and why?…..and all of this needs to be documented.

When something goes wrong or there is a major incident where a member of staff is or has been involved such as the unexpected death of a Service User, without the appropriate documented Evidence of the above, your agency is at a far greater risk of being fined or being found guilty of negligence, corporate manslaughter or gross misconduct.

Gathering all the Evidence you need to protect your agency; your Support Workers and your Service Users may sound like an impossible task but it doesn’t have to be.

Digital technology exists to help you easily and comprehensively log, store and access all your recorded evidence.

Why go digital?

If you’re not quite convinced of the power of going digital, of switching from manual care notes to electronic notes, consider the following:

SPEED

MAR charts, Topical medication Application reports (TMARs), Fluid Intake, ABC Charts, Safeguarding, Bristol Stool, Monitoring Charts, and the list goes on; your Support Workers have a lot to write up during a single visit. How much time does that take away from the provision of care on each visit? 10 minutes or even more?

With electronic notes, the time spent documenting tasks can be drastically reduced. With the CareSuccess mobile app, checklists for tasks considerably speed things up with voice-to-text functionality adding that vital layer of detail as all your Support Worker needs to do to make their notes is to click and talk.

ACCESS

Whether it’s the CQC or Social Services, dealing with demands to see Evidence of a Service User incident can be stressful. This is especially true if you have boxes of paperwork to wade through. With logbooks stored in Service Users’ homes, your Care Managers may not even be up to date on the current status of a Service User, let alone have easy access to vital notes. This situation is confounded by the eligibility of hurriedly written care notes as your Support Workers struggle to stay on schedule for each visit.

Electronic notes can be accessed anywhere, anytime. With the CareSuccess management portal, the Manager simply needs to tap in a quick search query over any given date range for a specific Service User or Support Worker to access the required notes.

Day-to-day, Managers can also see up-to-the-minute reports as the moment a Support Worker completes their electronic care notes for a visit, these notes are synced with the CareSuccess management app. In addition, our Red-Amber-Green (RAG) alert system enables Support Workers to clearly flag any issues they had on a visit so your Care Managers can quickly see whether or not they need to intervene.

ACCOUNTABILITY

How often do you deal with calls from family members who believe their loved one, your Service User, has not received the care they need? Perhaps they claim personal hygiene tasks were not completed or Medication was not administered.

With handwritten care notes stored at a Service User’s home, you haven’t got easy access to the information you need to provide them with an immediate, definitive response. You’ll need to make time to go get those notes, rummage through them and find what you’re looking for, though you may still come up empty if your support worker hasn’t documented all of their tasks.

Electronic notes don’t just give your Managers instant access to Evidence of completed tasks but with the CareSuccess management portal, every time your support workers log that they have completed a task, the task is time and date-stamped. Add to that GPS tracking and you’ll have convincing proof to show Service Users’ family members of where and when a task was completed.

What’s more, individual Service User care plans and their needs are built into their profile on the CareSuccess mobile app; if a Support Worker tries to log their completed notes having not ticked off a mandatory task, they’ll be alerted to their oversight and requested to submit their notes.

AUDITS

When it comes around to monthly audits, from Spot Checks and Shadowing to Mandatory Training and Hand Wash Audits, Evidence once again comes into play. The CQC wants to see what you’ve done and when you did it. As before, rifling through countless folders to dig out your proof is time-consuming. Electronic notes via the CareSuccess mobile app shared on the management portal enables you to quickly log in and easily access your audits. The same goes for Evidence of Complaints, Compliments and Suggestions.

All your evidence is in one place, easily retrievable and at the highest levels of security.

CareSuccess enables you to do away with mountains of paperwork by providing user-friendly digital apps that make creating, storing and accessing evidence easy for everyone, whether you’re tech-savvy or not.

Here is some of the functionality you can look forward to with CareSuccess:

• Attendance logs for arrival and departure times of Support Workers at Service Users’ homes
• GPS tracking of Support Worker visits to Service Users
• Evidence of completion of care plan tasks including:
  • Medication Administration Reports (MARs)
  • TMARs and Repositioning
  • Alerts indicating potential Safeguarding concerns
  • Antecedents, Behaviour and consequences (ABC data)
  • Bristol stool data
  • Ulcer grades (including photo uploads)
  • Food and Fluid Intake
  • Accidents, Incidents and Near Misses
  • Real-time alerts of completed visits (including logged care notes)
  • Clear indications of the need for intervention using the red-amber-green alert system.

There’s more to gain with CareSuccess’ state-of-the-art digital care technology. Every feature and function is designed to take away the stress that comes with the constant demand for evidence. With our suite of care apps, Evidence is easy to log and easy to access, leaving you to focus on providing excellent care.