How Care Homes Are Reclaiming Time for Carers

Care homes are navigating a complex web of documentation requirements, with forms often located across multiple separate systems. Staff are frequently required to juggle a variety of platforms for care planning, medication management, rostering, incident reporting, and other essential tasks. This fragmentation not only adds to the administrative burden but also increases the learning curve and creates inefficiencies that ripple across every level of care delivery.

With 165,000 staff shortages across the UK care sector, every minute of carer’s time is precious. Time spent switching between systems, transferring or duplicating information is essentially time taken away from providing hands-on care.

By adopting integrated digital platforms, many care homes are beginning to reclaim that lost time, reducing duplication, streamlining workflows and centralising all tasks and information.

Before Electronic Medication Administration Records, medication management was a time-consuming and fragmented process. Staff were required to manually check paper medication charts, document separately in medication record systems, and complete post-round administrative updates across multiple platforms.

The transition to eMAR systems reduced human error. With only one scan of a barcode, key processes like dosage scheduling, documentation and alerts for missed medication, but also automatically keeps track of stock are automated and updated across all platforms. This shift streamlines communication between care staff, pharmacists, and GPs, as it gives them access to people’s medication histories.

Previously, staff provided personal care to residents but then often had to complete documentation in their cars after visits or even take it home with them, which added extra pressure to their already demanding roles and interfered with work/life balance.

Switching from paper-based records to electronic ones in digital care planning solutions has made the documentation process far more efficient and manageable within the social care landscape, giving staff the ability to view and updated care plans in real time. This cuts down on delays, scattered information, and the need to repeat tasks.

This digitisation process has helped our customer, Erskine Nursing Homes, eliminate medication errors and maintain the consistency of their records across all their services, whilst freeing up nursing time for care conversations.

Digital systems can make the handover process more seamless and reassuring by allowing staff to record and access important information, like care notes, medication updates, overall changes in residents’ conditions in real time, but also to communicate any concerns or incidents.

This streamlining occurs through centralised platforms that can integrate multiple functions in one place, reducing the need for paper records or switching between separate systems, meaning that staff can log updates quicker and more efficiently, receive alerts, and access resident histories from both desktop and mobile devices, ensuring continuity and clarity across shifts.

This leads to improved communication, quicker decision-making, accountability, and overall better quality of care. 

The hours saved on administrative tasks can be transformed into meaningful, compassionate care. With more time available, caregivers can provide more personalized support, offering extended assistance with mobility and daily activities and ensuring that each resident feels comfortable and cared for. The time reclaimed from admin duties converts into more social interaction and trust building; not just with the clients, but with their families too, fostering a sense of partnership in the delivery of care and peace of mind that the client is at the heart of this process and being treated as an individual.

With reduced pressures during shifts, staff have the chance to grow and learn together, creating a supportive environment where experienced team members can guide and mentor newer members, all while maintaining a high standard of compassionate, person-centred care.

The relationship between efficiency and care quality isn't coincidental. Removing administrative barriers gives care teams the chance to focus on person-centred approaches that improve care outcomes.

Staff feel more fulfilled in their roles when they have more time to focus on providing direct care and building meaningful relationships, rather than being caught up in time-consuming admin. And when they feel valued and more connected to their work, they are more likely to stay, creating stable and consistent care teams.

Access Point of Care is transforming care management by addressing a long-standing challenge in the care sector, namely the fragmentation of care processes that are, by nature, interconnected. While care itself is holistic, traditional technologies have often forced teams to use multiple separate systems, leading to extra admin, a higher risk of errors, and less time for their residents.

Our fully integrated solution brings everything together in one intelligent platform that combines care planning, medication management, and operational oversight, all with a single login credential.
With one simple and intuitive system, care teams will easily be able to:

• Document assessments
• Create and update personalised care plans
• Safely manage medication
• Build and complete care records
• Have access to real-time documentation

In a sector faced with staffing challenges and regulatory pressures, operational efficiency becomes a competitive advantage.

The choice isn't between technology and care, but between fragmented systems that create barriers and integrated platforms that remove them. Six hours per week might seem like a small improvement, but when multiplied across your care team and redirected to resident care, it transforms both operational sustainability and care quality.

Ready to reclaim valuable time for your care team? Discover now how integrated care management can transform your operations whilst enhancing resident care quality.