This video by SCIE from 2014 showcases what is meant by working with personalisation.
Social Care Institute for Excellence
Ideally, the resident will be at the heart of every care task making sure that the care plan is as personalised as possible. This is an especially important aspect of improving the quality of life for residents with long term conditions since they will most likely stay at the care home for a longer time period.
So, what is a personalised care plan? Personalisation is all about being considerate and aware of the individual’s requirements, needs and desires. It is about knowing the resident as a person rather than a “patient” to take care of. To assist this process, care planning software can have a huge impact. Care planning software can provide the carers with information that might otherwise be forgotten by allowing staff to access the information needed when they are with the residents instead of going to the back office to look for it.
To provide some feasible tips and pointers as to how your residents’ care plans can get more personalised, we asked Founder and Director of BKR Care Consultancy, Bhavna Keane-Rao.
An essential part of working in a more bespoke plan through the resident’s care plan is to shift the focus from ”What’s wrong with you?” to “What matters to you?”. A way to do so is to focus more holistically on the resident’s personal history. What they did and what is important to them and very personal, so more will be revealed as they trust you more. This also means the ‘getting to know them’ part of being a carer is an on-going process.
It is important to bear in mind that the resident’s preferences might change over time. To accommodate these changes, it is vital to be able to change your records effortlessly, so they are always up to date.
Everything the resident does is in a unique way, and if the carers are able to observe and include this in the resident’s care plan, then they will be able to understand the resident even better. This way the staff will get to know what and why something upsets the resident and what to do to make them happy.
Working with a fully personalised care plan for each resident might seem impossible if you run a large care home with a lot of time constraints. This is where care planning software comes into play.
Denmark’s biggest Learning Disability care home has 213 residents, and encourage personalisation, to overcome the barriers of a generic care plan, by implementing a person-centred care plan for each resident, without compromising their service and capabilities of delivering on each of the residents’ care plans.
Another reason for working in a more personalised manner with care plans is the care staff. Most people that choose to work in care dream of enabling people and this empowerment possesses a massive scalability for social care. Staff are not there simply to alleviate problems, but within the framework of residential and nursing care, to really understand and be able to support their residents. This can be made possible through sharing this individual detailed knowledge of a person’s life. In doing so, we will enable them to live more holistic, fruitful and fulfilling lives, the kind that we ourselves would hope to lead.
Sekoia
