By the idyllic seaside in Wales, you’ll find Plas y Mor and The Oaks. Both homes are operated by Sapphire Streams.
Before Sekoia, these two homes were using paper to evidence the care they delivered. Something that was both time-consuming and labour intensive. Responsible Individual, Rachael Drew, elaborates:
“Before it could be quite hard to keep track of 15 different care plans, 15 reviews, 15 risk assessments. All in different places. Sekoia has brought all of that to the same place.”
Now, staff have all relevant information about the residents in one place. A place that can be accessed right at point of care using any type of tablet or phone. It has provided a structure throughout the two services. Both through collecting evidence of care and the approach to the residents. Rachael continues:
“What Sekoia has given the managers is that structure. The care plans all look the same. There is a matching risk assessment. It forces you to follow that extremely structured approach which has been incredibly helpful.”
The structured approach makes it easier to pull reports for the regulators. In this case, that’s the Care Inspectorate Wales (CIW). A process that previously took up hours of time can now be done at the push of a button.
“Sekoia has made follow-up information for CIW an awful lot easier because you can do things such as downloading reports and PDFs. For example, they asked for a care plan, review, and risk assessment for an anti-psychotic medicine. Along with behavioural differences. That would have been very difficult to do, had it all been on paper. Because you are taking information from 20 different places, whereas now you can just download specific reports in Sekoia.”
Many of the homes’ residents have complex needs. This further underlined the need to go digital and work in a more structured way. Especially in the light of increased regulation.
Rachael explains:
“We are facing an increasing amount of legislation and regulation, and without having a digital system, I think that would probably be impossible. Certainly for us. For the complex care we have.
When you look after 33 people with very complex needs. The data that generates is enormous and without a digital system to keep track of it, I don’t think you can evidence meeting compliance easily.”
After introducing Sekoia as their digital care planning system, there’s even more time to focus on the stuff that matters. The residents. This is ultimately also the reason there’s so much paperwork lying about in folders. Or there used to be.
“Since introducing Sekoia, it’s been so much easier to focus on stuff that matters rather than just monitoring and organising lots of paper folders. It allows you to concentrate on service, optimising care, organising activities. Because you’re not chasing your tail trying to find bits of information in, literally, mountains of paper.”
Rachael continues:
“Oversight of the service has been so much easier. I, as an RI (Responsible Individual), can drop into Sekoia, which I do 2-3 times a week just to do spot-checks. But oversight for the Manager and Deputy has also been much easier, because they can easier spot trends, see where staff are struggling, where the forms don’t quite work etc. Rather than spend 5 hours going through every paper record.”
It’s of vital importance to be able to rely on your support systems. Like your system for evidencing care. Whether that’s paper-based or digital. Otherwise, you might receive a less-than-favourable inspection report.
“Our culture has always been all about the resident. What we were struggling with was evidencing that. It’s a massive change to now be able to evidence what we do. Finally, the system has caught up with what the service is doing. Without Sekoia it’s virtually impossible to evidence that.”
From non-compliance to full compliance.
That’s the result for Sapphire Streams. And it’s the result of dedicated hard work from the entire organisation. And with the added Quality Assurance, Rachael concludes:
“For me, it’s been a no-brainer going with Sekoia. It has allowed me to oversee the compliance of the service. It has allowed me to get really granular detail which was difficult to get beforehand.”
Sekoia
