Care Sector Benchmarking – what is it and why is it so useful?

Understanding the benefits of Care Sector Benchmarking and how it can help care homes to contextualise their performance

The care industry is an industry that is ever evolving, and often the parameters of what make for best practices and good outcomes for care organisations can shift to represent the latest research, cultural shifts and clinical practices. In such an industry, it’s important that every care home understand their own performance in the wider context of the industry, and that is why care sector benchmarking is important. 

What is care sector benchmarking? 

A care sector benchmarking tool, like the one available with Person Centred Software, is designed to create and provide a series of data sets and dashboards that give insights into key quality and performance indicators where care homes can identify and compare against trends within the social care community that signal best practice.  

Like the tool offered by Person Centred Software, available as a feature of the digital care planning system, these benchmarks are gathered from information gained from similar local organisations and anonymised to comply with GDPR. They provide a broad range of metrics, such as number of falls, number of deaths or weight loss analysis, that can give you clear indicators of your organisation’s performance against ever-changing industry standards. 

Why is care sector benchmarking so useful? 

Because the nature of what it is to provide high levels of care is an evolving proposition, remaining at the forefront of best practices for care homes is crucial. Care homes need ways to ensure that they have a way of seeing tangible results that translate into quantifiers of quality of life and overall wellbeing of residents.  

Care sector benchmarking can help care homes to ensure they are maintaining high standards of care and operational excellence because they can set themselves against industry standards of best practice to not only promote a culture of continuous learning and improvement but also an environment where they can offer the highest quality service to residents. 

Through the identification of best practices and a comparison with them, care homes can optimise their operations, reduce wasted resources and time, enhance staff productivity and also improve staff work-life balance.  

Other benefits include: 

Helps to develop a standardised set of processes to monitor performance 

Reduces the need to rely on employing someone with skills in data – the process is                         very straightforward 

Change can be monitored easily 

KPIs can be more targeted and measured more accurately 

What can care sector benchmarking teach you? 

Care sector benchmarking can help you to understand what is achievable and what is expected. It can also help you to identify areas in which improvements can be made. It also means your care organisation is able to identify trends that occur in the wider community that could signal best practice and give you a greater understanding of your performance metrics because it will give you a much larger sample size against which to compare.  

For example, if your care home is noticing a trend that connects dehydration and falls that is increasing, using care sector benchmarking can give you a wider picture of the issue – rather than just using the small data sample size of your own home, it can tell you if other homes are seeing the same trend, and if so, you can be more confident in your decisions of how to rectify the issue. Or, if your ratio is an outlier, it will give you a data-backed assessment that practices need to be altered.  

Likewise, with falls for example, you can compare your data on falls, for example falls per day, per month, or by time of day, with a wider data set of other comparable organisations. This enlarged sample size will tell you if your fall numbers are in line with what is to be expected or whether you are experiencing avoidable numbers of incidents. 

Benchmark data and understand your performance with Person Centred Software 

Through the digital care planning system, Person Centred Software are able to capture an incredible amount of data. More still, we can give you the tools you need and the skills and knowledge, as well as the support, to make sense of that data and how to use it to improve your care provision. We can use this data to give you the insights you need to set benchmarks of quality and continuously improve your care provision based on the results of comparable services. 

Care Sector Benchmarking is just one of the numerous features of the digital care planning system that can transform the effectiveness, efficiency and quality of the care you can provide. To find out more about the Care Sector Benchmarking feature and the digital care planning system, just click here.