Thank you to Warrington Community Living for sharing the following article on their website. We love hearing how Nourish‘s digital platform  is helping and improving care services across the country!

We’re all taught that oral health is essential to keep our teeth healthy but what does this really mean? Poor oral health can lead to malnutrition, pneumonia and a weakened immune system which can make it harder to recover from common illnesses. Studies are being conducted to see whether dental hygiene has any links to dementia. So how can we encourage better dental hygiene?

Getting people you support to the dentist is no easy feat. Dental practices aren’t always accessible, medical settings can be quite distressing and getting there requires accessible transport and extra staff. Instead of taking the people you support to the dentist, why not bring the dentist to you? Domiciliary dental services provide dental care right at home.

Some local NHS trusts offer training on dental health for a few members of staff, appointing these staff members as Oral Health Champions. These Champions undertake the training and the responsibility of training existing and new staff.  Ensuring your service is working to the NICE guidelines and the Oral Health policy could also become part of the Champions’ role.

Activities are a simple and fun way to encourage conversations about good oral health. Brushing your teeth may not seem fun but, depending on the people you supports abilities, it can be! If you have any keen knitters, download knitting patterns for knitting teeth, tooth fairies or tooth fairy pouches for grandchildren, young relatives and friends’ children. Arty people could have a go at crafting teeth and toothbrushes out of leftover cardboard and painting them. If you have any connections to a local school or nursery, invite them over (Covid-19 permitting) for a lesson on mouthcare. You could even have a sensory afternoon of science experiments, making elephant toothpaste, growing plaque with yeast and sugar and, egg brushing.

The Nourish platform allows dental hygiene to be logged, tracked and managed and provides an Oral Health Assessment Tool (OHAT) for new admissions. In Nourish, you are able to plan, manage and evidence dental appointments and visits and use the OHAT for regular reviews on the oral health of those you support. The Alerts and Warnings function can ensure appointments and reviews are not missed. Because dental health can have a significant impact on the general health of the people you support, the ability to monitor means early intervention is possible.

Care owners understandably want to have peace of mind that everything is under control and running smoothly within their care service. The Compliance & Audits feature within Nourish can be used in a number of different ways to provide great insight into your care service depending on your individual requirements.

If you’re a hands on care owner, you may want to be able to look into detail at exactly how your care service is performing, and the ways in which it is improving people’s lives, or simply see the bottom line to understand how your care service is doing, and what needs to be done to continue to grow and improve. 

Compliance and Audits can do just that, and it can be tailored to suit the needs of your care service. Here’s just a few ways care owners can utilise this feature.

Every care service is run differently, and the flexibility of the Nourish system allows you to run things the way you want. Audits can look into both the running of the care service itself as well as the residents health and wellbeing, to ensure that everything is running smoothly.

You can choose from a bank of audits to understand specific areas, or create bespoke audits based on things that are more specific to your care service. Owners may wish to identify areas such as spending, predict CQC ratings or assess staffing needs.

Care owners can then add bespoke reports that are tailored to their needs which can assess overall quality of care being provided. They may want to report on failed admissions, GP visits or number of completed records by staff, to name just a few. 

These audits allow care owners to spot check certain areas where they may wish to improve or change, and it allows them to gain a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t. 

Care owners are bound to be busy, and the thought of having to sit down and sift through paper reports can be daunting. With Nourish, care owners can utilise Compliance and Audits by automating the reports they need on a regular basis, and this could be as frequent as is necessary for your care service. 

Automated reports take the hassle out of manual reporting, and ensure reporting is consistent for much more accurate data in the long run. This can be incredibly beneficial when it comes to inspections. 

Care owners can then look at data at the touch of a button, in as much or little detail as they like. This is really useful for those times when you may want to simply understand the bottom line, as you can see a top level overview of different areas of your care service. 

This also means that when it comes to a CQC inspection, you can streamline the process and simply produce any reports that they may wish to see. They’ll have all the information ready to look at without the need for trawling through mountains of paperwork. 

As a care owner, having a detailed understanding of every area of your care service is key to figuring out what works well and what may need improvement, and it can be hard to see the bigger picture sometimes without a good auditing system. 

Compliance and Audits within Nourish can help to gain a better understanding of your staff and those you support through the use of the bespoke audits and automated reports. 

With clear and consistent reporting, you will then be able to analyse data at a much deeper level, and at a much faster rate than paper reporting. This feature can also be used in conjunction with Nourish Analytics, to allow you to identify trends and correlation at scale throughout your care service. This is particularly useful for big care groups who may wish to monitor and track the level of service being provided across all sites, to ensure consistency in care. 

The Nourish system is designed to work with all different types of care providers, to be as flexible as possible so that care owners can tailor it to their needs. 

Compliance and Audits is just one element of Nourish that can provide care owners with a clear view and understanding of every area of their care service, so that they can make more informed decisions in order to maintain an outstanding level of care to those they support. 

For more information on how the Nourish system can help your care service, book a demo today!

As you may have already seen, we’ve developed a close working relationship with former CQC inspector Anne Weston. Anne is now part of RHW Care Consults, a specialist team designed to help care providers with their regulatory commitments, which helps to provide Nourish with critical guidance when it comes to regulatory updates and compliance. Her direct experience of how the regulatory bodies operate, along with her vast knowledge of the care industry, make her perfectly placed to help guide care providers on a range of different technical topics they may need advice on. This week, we spoke to Anne regarding one aspect of care recording that is often overlooked when working in a busy care environment – “positive person-centred care”.

Person-centred care is a way of providing care so that those receiving and giving it are on equal footing when it comes to developing, monitoring and undertaking care, ensuring it always meets a person’s individual needs. This doesn’t mean that you give people whatever they want, nor does it involve mindlessly providing information, it’s about considering a person’s individual and personal wishes, family, values and circumstances, then working with them to create the best possible solution for care that’s tailored to their individual needs.

When recording care, being positive means communicating in a manner that reflects the positive aspects of the care and support being described, and not just the negatives. It’s the difference between – “Gladys is unable to get to the toilet herself and frequently wets the bed” which is a negative way to record care. Instead you should record in a style that highlights what she is able to do, such as “Gladys is able to use the toilet when aided by one of the care team” and “This means that she needs to be helped to go to the toilet before she goes to bed and first thing in the morning”.

Here are my top areas for ensuring your care planning is both positive and person-centred:

The Nourish care management system allows you to style your recording in a way which is completely customised to the individual receiving care. With person-centred timelines at the heart of the system your care teams are helped to record care that is bespoke to the individual.

If you’d like to find out more about how Nourish’s care plan software can help you deliver person-centred care planning and management, then give us a call on 02380 002288 or email the team at caring@Nourishcare.co.uk and one of our experts will get in touch. To find out more about how Nourish can benefit your care service, book your personalised demo today.