Transform
The government has released a ‘What Good Looks Like’ (WGLL) guide for Local Authorities and care providers in England. This guide builds on the ‘People at the Heart of Care’ white paper from 2021. The guidance is aimed at individuals who have responsibility for digital transformation in both local authorities and care provider organisations and provides an aspirational framework to help them shape the future of digital solutions in social care.
The paper focusses on England, but it offers good practice and practical advice relevant to care providers across the UK and Ireland. To help CarePlanner users and others in home care learn from the White Paper, we’ve summarised its key points in a series of blogs.
Breaking Down the Sections
This guidance builds on the NHS What Good Looks Like framework and can be applied alongside the What Good Looks Like guidance for nursing. The DHSC page also contains a range best practice guides for digital working, and further supportive resources here.
For our third and final blog in this series we are examining the category ‘Transform’.
Improve Care
“Effective use of digital technology, data and processes can support the delivery of outstanding quality and personalised care and support at the right place and at the right time.”
Ultimately, digitisation is about improving care. The pursuit of this goal lies at the heart of every improvement that digitisation can bring. By saving time and money through digitisation, you can reinvest it in the care your team provides and improve outcomes for the people who draw upon your service.
Digital care management platforms, such as CarePlanner, can help you to improve your application of the data you are already gathering everyday. By examining this data and applying the information it gives you to the continual development of your care you can be dynamic, responsive and collaborative in your approach to care provision.
This can be through studying trends that were previously more difficult to recognise, building case studies over time on specific clients to better personalise their care or sharing experiences from different carers with the whole team in easily accessible documents sent directly to each person. There are a wide range of ways to use digital tools to improve the standards of your care.
This benefit is not dependent on spending a lot of money on new technology or hardware. As habits, successes, and even mistakes are all held in the same system, it becomes much easier to track them, learn from them, and adapt your approach.
Of course, it is vital to know where you are starting from so make sure you record your current practise before making any changes, otherwise you won’t have a record of the improvements your making!
If you would like to learn more about how CarePlanner can help you improve your services you can read our case studies on how Quality Home Care made significant savings or how Continuity Healthcare were able to improve their CQC rating.
Healthy Populations
“Having good data to understand and plan for the needs of the population (whether at a community level or individual level) means that we can reduce inequalities and improve outcomes for all people.”
You can change the way you provide care by using data effectively. By monitoring your care, you can gain insights you wouldn’t otherwise get. To ensure effectiveness, it must be balanced with a human approach.
Data security is vital for ensuring the privacy of your team and the people who utilise your care. You must also keep in mind the ethics of data collection. The danger is that when people are reduced to numbers and data points, you start to see them that way.
Co-production offers an effective bulwark against these bad habits. By involving people in the process of shaping their care, and keeping them in control of their own data you empower both the people themselves, and the service they are a part of.
The same rings true for finding the right digital partner. When you work with a supplier who understands your goals, and works with you and your community, you can ensure that together you use data securely and ethically. We have previously discussed the importance of Safe Practise in the What Good Looks Like guide. When considering the health of people in social care both the security of the data and how you apply the information you have gathered are crucial to your success.
We have worked closely with both third party developers and County Councils to develop innovative applications of data in care. The results have led to more effective support for carers such as integrations with financial support apps, and more fluid relationships with commissioners through our Local Authority Interconnector.
If you’d like to learn more about the power of data and how we work with providers to help them harness the power at their fingertips you can read our case study with Abney & Baker and see how they have utilised our Application Programming Interface to improve their service.