Really? Why Digital?. Why not? It's safe to say that the digital age has been around for a long time and more often than not its blighted by trashy social media and interactive reality shows but look deeper and we can find just how useful and beneficial it is. The possibilities are endless and the more digital technology we can access, the easier we can make things for the workforce, if it's done right.
Too many people focus on negativity (I can't use that, I don't know how, what's wrong with pen and paper etc) and are reluctant to learn and use new things, but these things are getting easier to use every day. I have worked in the care sector for over 25 years and been a manager for 19 of those years, I remember, in 2004, summoning a rep from Vodafone because I had an idea to use pocket PC's to relay information back to my boss. It was the old HP iPaq machines, way waaaay before mobile phones were the norm and 3 years before the world was introduced to iPhones. I asked if we could transfer our current paperwork onto the handheld devices as word files and be able to edit them for sending to head office. Yes it was possible but no I couldn't have it as my boss was a technophobe and the handsets were around £500 a piece plus the cost of running them made it a complete no no.
So here I am, 15 years later and everything I dreamed about back then is now reality, and how happy am I? Well, surrounded with folder with hundreds and hundreds of pages, wonky ring binders, punches, staplers and printers, I'm pretty excited that I finally get a chance to introduce a fully digital care management system into our home and also be the one who tutors staff on how to use it because I think the key to making it work is helping staff shake off the negativity and get pretty damn excited about what it means for us as a team. I have every faith that our team can get on top of this and make it work perfectly. It covers the entire care plan, daily notes, residents register, staff register, training logs, supervisions, we can log all our events, birthdays, quickly access information required for medical emergencies, we can display dependency levels as charts, send messages to groups of staff or individual ones, keep digital logs of everything with just a few taps of a screen or even using the dictation feature. It doesn't take much to make this as exciting for staff as it is for me. We have had many meetings and undertaken some trial runs so when it comes to rolling it out for real everyone is prepared because they know it's ok to make a mistake, it's ok to not be able to do it properly because we are learning together and if we learn together we can grow together. I'm more than confident in my capability to use this system and be able to train staff how to get the best out of it. I will be encouraging them to keep up their PRTL as well as seeking out the abundance of non statutory modules that they can use for themselves and their own development.
BM
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