Providing the ultimate in aged care with 1Place compliance software
Ultimate Care Group is a leading New Zealand aged-care provider specialising in all levels of care. The group has 19 facilities across the country with 1000 staff members caring for more than 900 residents.
Providing round-the-clock care for some of society’s most vulnerable people comes with considerable responsibility in what is a tightly-regulated industry. Head of Clinical Services Shereen Singh says they depend on 1Place’s cloud-based compliance software to deliver the very best in local aged care.
Compliance software with flexibility to evolve
The group has utilised 1Place for a number of years, initially as a basic tool to log incidents.
Today, the customisable app is used extensively across clinical and operational teams as a hazard register, to monitor audit and compliance, manage people, complaints and compliments.
Each day, 100 to 200 incidents are logged into the 1Place software. For every new incident, 1Place assesses the risk, flags necessary next steps and generates an email alert to relevant managers to action.
“It’s a huge system. We’ve currently got 9382 incidents and about 6000 infections logged and we can jump on top of each one. It’s made life much easier,” says Singh. 1Place reporting allows Singh to make sense of the vast amounts of securely stored data within the app.
“We are able to customise features of the app to benchmark against ourselves, which enables us to start putting more efficient processes in place,” says Singh. Between 2017 and 2019, the organisation increased compliance by more than 120%.
Personalised health data through 1Place reporting
Staying on top of each resident’s health is simple with 1Place’s People Manager feature. Staff can log a person’s weight over time, and every infection, incident or accident they have.
“Say a resident has fallen 14 times in two weeks. A nurse manager or a senior nurse can print out a report that tells her the dates the person has fallen, the shift when this happened, where they’ve fallen and the timing so we can prevent it from happening again.
“For example, if it’s clear the incidents happen during handover, when fewer staff are on hand, we will make sure a staff member is released to help the particular person out.”
Similarly, 1Place reporting can identify if a resident is suffering from an increasing number of infections. “This data tells us that the resident’s health could be declining, which prompts us to talk with the family.”
On a national level, Singh says she can run a report pinpointing facilities with a disproportionate number of falls or infections. “We can drill down to the detail. It could be identifying one person having a lot of chest pain every month.” Singh says they hope to personalise this feature further by using the app to specify corrective actions.
“For example, if a report identifies a resident who has lost 5 percent of their body weight over the past month, the app will automatically prompt staff to weigh the resident every month, increase their protein and carbs, and notify family members.”
Audits made easy with 1Place compliance checklists, live dashboards
Every month, facility managers will complete an audit checklist through 1Place in preparation for an official audit.
The checklist prompts the facility managers to review everything covered by an official audit. Once completed, the information immediately appears as a percentage score on Singh’s intuitive dashboard.
Being live, Singh and other head office users can see up-to-the-minute compliance data across the group, regionally or nationally.
Singh says the ability to compare former audits makes it easy to identify whether facilities have improved or regressed.
“It gives us the bigger picture. If we didn’t have 1Place, we’d have to rely on hard copies. Doing that for 19 facilities and analysing each of them would be very difficult.”
