"The result so far is way better than both the staff, the residents and their visitors could imagine. The working environment is less stressful for the staff now that they can focus on being there and spending quality time with the residents instead of doing manual work and handovers between the shifts. Everything is recorded and tracible through the app."
Background & challenge
We visited a nursing home in central Lisbon, Portugal that needed to update their old solution with discontinued call pendants, and their solution provider had not provided an alternative for the last three years. A pilot project is done to move from the analogue solution to a smart solution to increase the benefits for residents/care receivers and the staff/care givers.
The nursing home consists of three floors where our partner has a pilot project going on in one of the floors, to make a good comparison between the old and new solution.
The old system consists of buttons placed inside each room, one by the bedside and one in the bathroom. When an alarm is triggered, the staff will hear a sound, and a display in the corridor will show what room that pressed the alarm. When taking the alarm, they will manually reset the alarm by the bedside and/or bathroom.
New Solution
The new pilot solution consists of pendants that the care receivers can wear either on their arm in a wristband or in a necklace around the neck.
When an alarm is triggered, the staff then receives an alarm in the mobile phone app that they all wear when they are on duty. The staff closest to the room can then act on the alarm, and let their colleagues know by using an NFC-tag inside the room of the resident that triggered the alarm.
Implementation
It took only a couple of hours to get the pilot up and running for the whole floor and it has now been running for almost four months.
The implementation consisted of configuring all pendants to the right rooms, training the staff on how to use the mobile response app and set up infrastructure (routers) to make sure that the wifi connection is good enough through the whole building.
Result
The result so far is way better than both the staff, the residents and their visitors could imagine. The working environment is less stressful for the staff now that they can focus on being and spending quality time with the residents instead of doing manual work and handovers between the shifts. Everything is recorded and tracible through the app.
The staff can now easily see where their colleagues are located, and can easily call them through the app if they need support, call a nurse or an ambulance, right from where they are standing.
For the residents their living environment has changed a lot since they now can move around more freely, knowing that they can press their alarm at any time. Since the alarm now goes straight to the staff’s mobile phones, the alarm sound in the open areas is totally gone.
With this new way of working, the nursing home can offer a more personalised care for each and every one of residents and their needs. With the open (Skyresponse) platform they can easily adapt new technology when needed. So some residents have for example smart cameras for night vision located in their specific rooms.
Everything is tracible with all data collected into the app and the reporting is granular. The data and statistics collected can be used for management and HR to make better decisions on resource planning etc. There is also the possibility of assessing the quality of care the elderly person receives. And for the resident’s families, this means quality of care and access to detailed information on what is happening to their loved ones.
