The home care business is profitable for some, while others struggle to survive. For the past five years, the UK home care sector has been consistently growing by 2.4% per year, outpacing the growth of the economy overall. However rising costs and underfunding pose a persistent challenge.
The growth of the home care sector is driven by demand arising from long-term demographic trends. The number of people in the UK who are over 65 years old is 11 million and rising and it is estimated that by 2030 the number of people with dementia in the UK will exceed 1 million.
Additionally, the NHS is overburdened and the government realises that lack of social care capacity is a key driver of delayed discharges.
By reading this article you will have a better understanding of home care business profits and you will also learn some proven strategies to increase home care agency profit margins.
How to choose the right software for domiciliary care? If you’re looking for software for your home care service then I’m sure you’re asking this very question right now. Understandably too. There are so many different options, and not much information available in terms of what you should be looking for when comparing different domiciliary care software.
In this article we will cover the key areas you should be looking for when choosing domiciliary care software.
If you are a residential care provider then you should read this article on How To Choose the Right Software for a Care Home instead.
This article covers the six most crucial points you need to consider when choosing software for your home care service/s.
Once you've read it and taken all the points on board, you will be able to make a more informed decision on the right domiciliary care software for you. You will have greater confidence that you're making the best choice, and maximise your Return On Investment.
Do you want to know how to grow your home care business? When it comes to achieving scalable business growth, there is no magic bullet that works. What does work is drawing up a well-thought-out strategy and executing it one step at a time.
At Access we work with thousands of successful home care businesses who have achieved steady and consistent growth over the years.
In this article we will share the most effective strategies we know to help you grow your home care business.
Empowerment in health and social care can be key to the success and happiness of your service users. In life, there are things we can’t control. These situations can make you feel frustrated, powerless and disheartened. Over time, this can chip away at your confidence and self-esteem, leading to negativity and poor decision-making.
We can make decisions and plans because we have personal power and are in control of our own lives, so what about the people you care for?
Socially isolated people, those with poor or declining health or less autonomy can become fearful of positive risk-taking. The frustrations of not being able to do the things they once loved or simple daily tasks can lead to a loss of independence, assurance and self-empowerment. Fortunately, there are things you can do to help promote empowerment and reduce the risk of these feelings developing in your care service.
To gain a deep understanding of empowerment in health and social care you should download this FREE guide: ‘E is for Empowerment & Engagement’. It takes an in-depth look into both subjects and how they work together to improve the quality of care. These guides are a great resource for care workers, managers and leaders in care and are completely free for you to download.
As you can see, we at The Access Group have digitised and worked with care services across the world for a long time, in fact, we started this journey in health and social care 30 years ago. Over time, we've learned exactly what you need to succeed in care. So, we have put this article together to help you fully understand the importance of empowerment in health and social care, what it is, the factors that can affect it and useful empowerment strategies.
In social care, effective communication goes beyond knowledge and expertise to incorporate every aspect of interaction and experience. Care workers need to have the ability to empathise when needed and talk about potentially complicated procedures and issues calmly. Confrontation or disagreements can happen, and the need to defuse these challenging situations is perhaps the most important use of strong communications skills in care.
We previously published an article talking about the importance of staff training in health and social care, but perhaps a more important discussion was had in an article about empowerment in health and social care. Written by my colleague Neoma Toersen, her article discusses the risks inherent from clients losing autonomy and feeling like they no longer have control. This is where effective communication comes in, and can help develop a rapport, build a connection, and allow proper discussion about the wants, wishes and needs of the person receiving care.
In this article we will assess communication in health and social care, with a particular focus on barriers of communication in health and social care and how we can overcome them – with special mention of our eLearning for care software. Our hope is that by reading this article you will have a better understanding of how to navigate not only the base level of conversation with patients or clients, but also the channels of communication and how to best go about engaging with people to make connections, gain insights, and ultimately improve their care.
What is communication in health and social care?
The Mental Capacity Act (MCA), Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) and Liberty Protection Safeguards (LPS) are a crucial trio that ensure vulnerable individuals to receive appropriate care while respecting their autonomy. The landscape of care is guided by a framework of legislation to safeguard the rights and well-being of individuals who may lack the capacity to make decisions for themselves.
Fully understanding MCA, DoLS and LPS may be difficult for some. There is a lot of information out there and knowledge and practice are constantly changing. With over 30 years of experience working with thousands of care providers across the country, we at The Access Group know what you need to do to stay compliant while providing outstanding care.
With the help of our experts, we have put together this article that contains everything you need to know about MCA, DoLS and LPS that is easier to interpret and accomplish in your care service. For a more in depth view, you can take a look at our Guide to DoLS: What You Need to Know.
Care home occupancy is a key performance indicator for care homes. As you know, care homes are responsible for providing specialised care to the elderly and people with a wide range of personal care needs and/or medical conditions. The concept of care home occupancy revolves around the number of service users currently residing in a care home and utilising its services versus the overall available capacity of that care home.
Maintaining high occupancy rates is essential for care home providers. Unfilled beds represent lost income potential and with a growing ageing population in the UK, it also means that there are vulnerable people out there who aren’t having their needs met. With over 30 years of experience working with and digitising care services, we at The Access Group know how to help you optimise care home processes and have expertise in applying this to improve care home occupancy rates.
In this article, we will take a look into how to boost occupancy in care homes, the dynamics of care home occupancy, factors that influence it, strategies to increase occupancy and common mistakes to avoid.
The Care Inspectorate grades are used by the Care Inspectorate Scotland. The Care Inspectorate plays a vital role in ensuring the excellence of social care services across the country and they use their own set of guidelines and grading systems to do so. Using their comprehensive grading system, the regulator will evaluate various aspects of a care service and use their findings to rate them. As a result, valuable insights will be provided on the performance of services and the rating will influence their reputation.
With over 30 years of experience digitising care services across the world, we at The Access Group know what your care service needs to do to boost compliance and ensure that the highest quality of care is provided to service users. We’ve put together this article for Scottish service providers to elaborate on the grading criteria and offer tips on how to achieve better grades. We have also put together examples using the inspection reports available at Care Inspectorate Scotland.
Data protection in health and social care is concerned with safeguarding intimate details of vulnerable people. Health and social care providers have a duty of care to secure the personal data of the people they support and protect their dignity, well-being and safety.
Due to the sensitive nature of the information being handled, workers in health and social care must hold themselves to a higher standard than workers in other sectors. For example, the fact that someone with autism is scared of the colour green could be used to intimidate them if this information was leaked.
The health and social care sector faces many challenges to achieving cyber security. Digital literacy of staff across the sector is low, with workers having only a basic understanding of IT and a low awareness of data security issues. When allocating spending, providers prioritise improving the day-to-day welfare of people over enhancing their cyber security infrastructure.
In this article we will explore the current issues around cyber security and data protection in health and social care. We will break down what you need to know about the latest Data Protection Act in health and social care, then offer practical solutions that you can adopt to improve your data protection policies and procedures.
Prevention and early intervention in health and social care is undoubtedly crucial to ensure we delay future care needs, reduce hospital admissions and readmissions, and reduce the pressure on the NHS, and clinicians, and social care providers.
But, you are probably aware there has been a shift towards implementing more proactive care to catch illnesses and conditions earlier to reduce hospitalisations, discharge delays and have a better and bigger positive impact on people’s lives so no care need is left unmet.
The shift towards proactive care is important as it is driven by the desire to improve outcomes, enhance quality of life, and create a more sustainable and efficient health and social care system.
With more than 10% of patients being on waiting lists for treatments for up to a year, making the shift from reactive care to preventative and proactive care is essential to delay and reduce the need for further care and support in the future. Digital telecare is a great way to achieve by offering the opportunity to increase independence and decrease the dependency on social care providers and the NHS.
But what exactly is the difference, and why is the shift important, how will being more proactive help local authorities, hospitals, and most importantly the individual?
At the Access Group we are aware of how important the shift to proactive care is and want to make this shift as easy as possible to minimise disruption.
This article will review the difference between reactive, preventative and proactive care to highlight the importance of being more proactive to address every unmet need and ensure no one is left without the high quality care they need, as well as what the challenges are when making the shift to proactive care and how best to overcome them.
