Introduction
The team at St Joseph’s were invited to participate in a remote monitoring programme by Coventry and Warwickshire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and the project has been fully funded by NHSX and has proven to bring benefits to both care home staff and to residents as well.
Remote patient monitoring enables community care and primary care to have access to and transfer clinical data, making it easier for care staff to contact GPs about unwell residents. Remote monitoring enables care team staff to regularly check their residents’ vital signs and get a speedy response from clinical teams if any issues are flagged up.
What was the challenge?
As with many care homes, the COVID-19 pandemic meant that physical visits from GPs to residential homes were radically reduced. St Joseph’s Care Home have a great relationship with their local surgery, but wanted to benefit from a remote monitoring scheme in order to maintain continuity of care with their GPs, while not necessarily being in the same location.
What happened?
St Joseph’s residential community in Coleshill, North Warwickshire provides services for older people and those living with various types of dementia and is part of the charity Father Hudson’s Care, which through a range of services, offers help and support to those who are disadvantaged, marginalised or experiencing need. The team at St Joseph’s were introduced to Docobo in January 2021, when the home was about to embark on its third COVID outbreak, so it could be said that the timing was not great! However, the roll out of the Docobo remote monitoring solution happened smoothly and the team are delighted with the ongoing results.
Quick and easy to install and easy for staff to use
The team had remote training over three sessions where they learned how to use equipment.
This is how it works:
- Care Team Leader records vital signs and symptoms into tablet (using thermometer, blood pressure monitor, oximeter) provided by the Project.
- Information transferred to clinical system and goes to the GP surgery.
- Care home can track information on clinician website
- The clinician responds to any requests or alerts within two hours and the alert is triaged.
- Baseline readings can be recorded monthly with a ‘Resident of the Day’ system.
Improved access to clinicians and saving time for care home staff
Annie Frost explains:
We have seen a difference – the medical team picked up and treated very quickly. A few weeks ago, we were doing a virtual ward with a GP and when doing the ‘wellbeing question set’ it flagged up a problem, this was cascaded quickly and the patient put on medication. This all came from doing the ‘wellbeing question set’ and syncing the data.
The system is also really good at capturing when someone has an acute-infection markers, which are captured quickly and there is a very quick turnaround of 2 hours. Just getting in the data early means that we don’t physically have to phone the GP. It’s great!
Saving time for GPs with less call outs to the residential home
Since the start of the project, St Joseph’s have had a clinical response from the iSPA Care Co-ordination team within 2 hours in over 80% of cases submitted.
St Joseph’s residents also benefit from having their observations taken every month.
Annie concludes:
The staff have picked up the system far quicker than we expected, possibly because we are are all used to using a tablet, which makes it much less daunting. The software is very self-explanatory, the system is really easy to use, and the teams are now very familiar with it. We are really pleased with the results and the ongoing project!
