It’s not always easy to entrust your loved one’s care to someone outside of the family. How do you know the nursing home or long-term care facility is up to par? What kind of services do they provide, and how do you know whether those services are of high quality?
Thankfully, many nursing homes and other facilities are working to improve their services in three key areas: employee training, communication between departments, and data management. All three of these areas work together to ensure the best care possible for residents. Read on to learn more about them.
Employee Training
Employees are often being trained in person-centered care, which involves patients in the planning and delivery of their own treatment. It ensures they understand their treatment and have a more active role in their own lives. In addition, some employees are now legally able to delegate tasks to direct care workers under their supervision, according to a study by the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging.
This frees the nurses up to take care of more pressing issues related to their patients and trains direct care workers in day-to-day interactions that strengthen their own skills. As a result, the whole workforce is better equipped to take care of residents and their needs.
Communication Between Departments
Many facilities suffered from the negative effects of a hierarchical command structure. Now, they are encouraging lower-level staff to participate in care planning and decision making across departments to ensure better care. Families of loved ones in nursing homes are also being encouraged to visit frequently and visit different areas of the nursing home, as well as to establish good relationships with everyone involved in their loved one’s care.
This helps them be an active participant in the care being given and helps staff make sure they know what’s going on in other departments. Because so many staff members, from nurses to physical therapists, work together for every patient’s care, it’s important they know what’s going on across the board.
Data Management
Certain data management technologies can help out with cross-departmental communication while gathering the enormous amount of information necessary to ensure proper care. Facilities need to collect data on whether nurses are checking in with their patients enough, which patients need which medications, and more.
A data management system can also check for erroneous and missing data by detecting trends and alerting staff to when something isn’t quite right. It can also send out automatic email updates to make sure everyone is on the same page and has all of the information they need to provide proper care. This makes data collection and analysis almost automatic, allowing staff to deal with more important issues.
Though choosing to place a loved one in a nursing home or other long-term care facility isn’t easy, it helps to know most of these are working to improve patient care by keeping up with developments in employee training communication, and data management. These three areas work together to ensure the best possible care for residents, and any nursing home that follows these new standards should give you peace of mind.
