The Good Care Group

Delivering Good Care Together

Context

The Good Care Group is an award-winning provider of 24-hour live-in care, with 450 people receiving care across England and Scotland. Over half of the individuals supported are living with a form of dementia. People with a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and older people who are generally frail are also supported.

The group employs over 1,000 professional carers. It wanted to digitise care records to provide a real-time record so that they could deal with issues more efficiently, support care staff and monitor a person’s outcomes.

Approach

Trying to move from paper to digital records, the Good Care Group set out to find a provider that could offer a system that was both user-friendly and that suited the requirements of a live-in care provider. Unable to find the right solution on the market, they decided to develop an in-house solution.

Working with a user-experience expert and IT development partners, the group designed a ‘carer community’ platform with carers, for carers. Professional carers were involved in discussion groups where they articulated the challenges they were facing with paper records, and put together wish-lists for a new system.

Early versions of the software were tested with groups of professional carers, who were asked to give feedback on how easy it was to use, how best to access the system as well as whether the proposed training provided enough information and clarity. In discussions with carers, low-cost but high-impact system features were identified.

Success

The group created ‘Good Care Together’, a platform that allows carers to log care documentation digitally, manage medication, enable real-time monitoring for care managers and provide up-to-date information for families. By supporting their people, focusing on what matters, and involving their carers in deployment, they were able to secure good adoption of their system with few problems.

Working closely with staff, they were also able to take up their good ideas. For example, creating social messaging forums that allowed special interests and strengths such as dementia management or creative meal preparation to be developed and communicated to support others in their approach.

The record provides some key operational functions that save time, support staff, provide data, and improve safety. A further development also allows families to keep abreast of what clients are doing and how they are being cared for. The link to the electronic medication administration record has resulted in no medication errors serious enough to require a regulatory notification since it has been launched.

The system also enables care managers to have a real-time insight into what is happening in a placement, such as how long a person has slept, and their fluid intake. They have used this strategically to improve their services. Through the introduction of urinalysis testing kits, for example, it was able to evidence a 68% reduction in emergency intervention for urinary tract infections.

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