Achieving a new standard of excellence in care planning using Person Centred Software’s Digital Care Planning System

Chris Green, Health and Safety Officer at Orchard Care Homes, describes how Person Centred Software’s Digital Care Planning System, mCare, transformed the way care is provided at their care homes 

Before we originally trialled the digital care planning system, mCare, back in 2017, we were still using paper-based care plans, which are a nightmare! We found that it was quite difficult to maintain complete oversight using paper-based care plans because apart from anything else, you had to physically be in the location to review the care plan; it was not possible to support care staff or check care plans or risk assessments from afar. This meant that valuable time was being taken up unnecessarily.  

Using a paper-based system also affected the quality and quantity of care notes. In most cases, carers could only update the care notes two or three times a day due to the requirement of having to leave the residents to sit at a desk to document and evidence the care they had provided. After long and strenuous shifts, the carers would understandably forget certain details, and despite their best efforts, this resulted in incomplete care notes.  

By making the switch to Person Centred Software’s digital care planning system in 2018, we have been able to capture much more information than when we were using a paper-based system. The number of daily care notes that are recorded in the system compared to what we used to have, where it might be two or three entries a day, is phenomenal. Now with mCare we can do so much more than what was previously possible by leveraging features of the system like the Care Delivery App, which our staff use to evidence the care provided to residents in real-time during their shift. The great thing about this is the icon-driven interface, which has a Speech to Text function and pre-populated care notes that can be selected for each resident, who all have profiles on the system. Using these features on the portable handset that our staff can carry around with them, they can drastically reduce the time it takes to compile accurate care notes by logging them as and when they need to.