What is complex care?

What is complex care?

Complex care refers to care for people that have chronic or long term health conditions, including but not limited to acquired brain injuries, neurological conditions, spinal injuries, disabilities or even the use of feeding tubes.

Complex care needs typically require a greater degree of clinical expertise and involvement than most social care services, such as personal care for adults.

Complex care needs can be cared for through a variety of services, such as Live-in Care (sometimes called complex care at home) which offers round-the-clock support to you in your home, so you can receive the care you need whenever you require it. 

Visiting care which is dedicated home care on an hourly basis that allows you to choose when and how you need support. Respite care is designed to be delivered on a short-term basis from either a live-in carer or visiting care. 

Complex Care in a residential or nursing home, which helps residents to reduce the length of stay in a hospital and enables families to focus on their loved one.

What is needed to provide complex care for adults?

It is important with complex care that the carer, nurse or clinician, is proficient in an array of specific care methods, as well as being able to help service-users lead independent, active, and fulfilled lives whenever possible. For the service-user and their family, it can be challenging to find carers with the experience needed for individual complex care needs. But having skilled complex carers will really strengthen the care you already provide.

Providers like Cornerstone Healthcare were named the best Complex Care provider in the UK in 2020 at The HealthInvestor Awards, were noticed for their “impressive” and “innovative” approach to dealing with individual service users and “its ability to offer a home to those who struggle to be cared for in “ordinary” care home settings”. Expanding your care business to include Complex Care can really broaden the care you provide and differentiate yourself from other organisations, in busy care providing market.

At its heart, complex care seeks to be:

• Person-Centered: Complex care needs to be person centred care. It begins with the human being, their strengths, and their goals, and leverages their relationships and natural daily structures to heal and sustain them.
• Equitable: Complex care recognizes the structural barriers to health and supports consumers and communities to address them.
• Cross-sector: Complex care works to break down the silos dividing fields, sectors, and specialties, and to build the integrated ecosystem necessary to provide whole-person care.
• Team-based: Complex care is delivered through interprofessional, non-traditional, and inclusive teams of medical, behavioural health, and social service providers, led by the individual themselves.
• Data-driven: Complex care freely shares timely, cross-sector data across team members and partners to identify individuals, enable effective support of consumer goals, and evaluate success.

Core competencies for complex care capture the necessary knowledge, skills, and attitudes for members of the complex care workforce. The characteristic of the complex care workforce is the ongoing wellness-driven interactions with people with complex health and social needs. You can find out more about the core competencies here.

Alongside competencies, some specialist equipment (and the knowledge and training to use it properly) may also be required to deliver certain types of care for adults with complex care needs.

What are the benefits of complex care?

There are a variety of benefits of Complex Care, a key one being whilst there will still be a need for hospital visits, a qualified and experienced carer will be able to reduce the number of unnecessary hospital admissions and be able to explain what the patient is going through to reduce the stress levels of everyone involved.

It also fulfils the need for companionship too, a lot of complex care options offer this as a service, meaning hospital visits are not the only time a loved one gets to socialise. It avoids disruptions to usual living arrangements, reduces the fear of losing independence, and can even reduce harm and variation, as the service-user removes risks associated with in-patient stay and has fewer complex discharge issues to resolve.

Building and training your complex care team

The biggest risk for complex care is not having sufficient training or qualifications as a carer. The regulators look at care providers and the competence of care teams, and when caring for such severe conditions its key that carers or nurses have the most comprehensive knowledge on dealing with the complexity.

The overall aim of care is to have the right staff in the right place at the right time, providing the right service. With complex care, establish a workforce strategy to actively identify and manage those staff that have specific training or experience in planning and providing services for people with complex needs. The strategy should include a system for developing and enhancing the future workforce with the knowledge and skills necessary to work effectively within a multidisciplinary and complex environment.

Whether this strategy is using a third party training specialist or eLearning as an approach, Access eLearning For You offers a wide range of courses designed to develop carers knowledge, both new and experienced to help them provide the best possible care and get recognised by the regulator in doing so.

It is so important that carers have adequate training, social care organisations that take the time to train and invest in their staff will maintain a reputation in the industry and wider communities as professional and dedicated providers. Training staff will ensure that the risk of accidents and injuries are significantly reduced, as staff will have the knowledge and skills to deal with complex care needs.

Care planning software for complex care

Electronic Care Plans are also an asset when delivering complex care. Given the volumes and complexity of information being accessed, updated and recorded, intelligent software, accessible on mobiles, tablets and web browsers, is better than paper records or halfway house software.

Electronic care planning software ensures the information carers, clinicians and nurses access is always up to date and not out of date. It enables coordination and collaboration between different colleagues and teams. It makes accessing and updating information faster, so people delivering complex care can spend more time caring and communicating with the person they are supporting.

Our complex care management software provides a complete framework suitable for all complex care requirements and allows you to provide the right care for your service users with complex and intensive care needs. Access Workspace for Care ensures you recruit the best skilled staff, your carers and clients are perfectly matched, and your clients substantial and ongoing care requirements are being met.

Find out more about our software solutions and book a demo here