Care Home Food Quality, Foods for Healthy Diet
The interface is so clear, simple and fun to use that our residents enjoy interacting with the system to play games, book activities and order their favourite foods
Food and nutrition care
"You are what You Eat... "is one of those phrases that we hear often. However, with the various other important elements that require attention during the day, quality of food and diet can sometimes turn into a routine. With years of experience and working with specialist nutrition consultants we have developed the Chef solution to allow the kitchen team to understand the individual nutrition needs of a service user. This not only includes preferences but also allergy and cultural information.
A balanced diet can reduce the need for unnecessary medication and laxatives. It can also have a positive impact on mood and behaviour. If anyone thinks working in a care home kitchen is easy, they are recommended to try a shift. The person will quickly discover how important and careful we must be with our actions in feeding the people we love and look after. This is way beyond just 3 meals a day and requires far more thought, planning and intelligence. We need to move with the seasons and create a menu and choice that gives variety, balance and nutrition.
How It Works
- Create, design and print menus, with easy copy and clear features. Includes library of popular dishes. Easily add custom dishes and photos
- Access to weight tracking, BMI and Must
- Chef becomes involved in the care, can access allergies and food likes and dislikes
- Photo and image driven menu choices, helping the service user see and understand the choices, increasing appetite and promoting choice. Service users with capacity can even sign e-consent to evidence the choice made.
- Record fridge temperature checks and other elements of food safety departments and send quick messages
- Food consistencies and SALT levels fully included within the system easily accessible to care and kitchen team
- Bristol stool chart for monitoring bowel movement, sleeping charts to be considered with food choices for menu during the day
- Control the access and visibility of the kitchen team through permissions and settings
- Reduce food wastage with breakdown of orders per floor or service user. Break this down per item on the menu to see what is popular and help with costing and ordering
- Access to message center to keep in touch with team members from different departments and send quick messages
Frequently Asked Questions
We know that many homes are still working effectively from paper systems. We recognise it is the home and the team that make the difference and any system is only as good as those people entering the evidence. There are many paper homes that have outstanding ratings and have systems of working safely and effectively. You don’t have to worry about the system going down or lack of training. However, the disadvantages include the time spent on updating paper which can be enormous and this takes you away from the people you are looking after. Handwriting can also be eligible and care staff have the tendency not to capture accurate detail and can write similar, generic information for each person. The same can also be said for many care management systems on the market, but with the experience of running and commissioning services we have built in the simplicity and intelligence to make live up to our tag line less admin more caring.
Please get in touch to arrange a demo or call and we can talk through some of the available options for getting started. We are so confident that you will like the system, if for any reason you are not satisfied with the system you can get a full refund within four weeks of signing up.
The Care Vision solution suite is entirely modular. You can add and remove as you go. This helps with implementation as things can be broken down into digestible sections. Focussing on the care elements is great way to start. Visitor Book and Clocking In modules are also really easy to get started on and can transform the way in which you carry out your evidence capturing.
With our years of care experience, we understand the environment and abilities of the staff team in these settings. When creating Care Vision, our own carers had technical challenges in their approach to the system. It caused a lot of anxiety before rolling the system out. In reality once the carers and nurses realised that Care Vision is a tool to aid them in their daily tasks and make their work easier, they fully embraced and got behind this. It is important to take your care staff with you and involve them in the process but at the same time it does require determined leadership to ensure that the culture can change within the organisation. The source of this anxiety is more fear of the unknown as opposed to the system itself. Once people start feeling Care Vision directly their anxiety dissipates. The simple user interface and prompting elements make it so easy to use and get to know. Most people can use a smart phone these days and if not the system flow has been designed in such a way to make this easier to learn. We also have great time saving features such as speech to text and translation which helps get notes into the system with ease, saving time all along.
We offer a data migration service, where our team uploads all your important data into your care vision cloud. This way when we carry out your onboarding you are looking at your own data and service users. We save you all the time and hassle of this data entry and you can get started.
Rishi grew up in the family’s first care home. Having this type of connection and experience cannot be underestimated and we have used this to build the system on strong foundations. Using some of the other systems on the market or so called ‘big names’ we have found out firsthand that many CMS do not deliver on the promises of quality or service. Our experience gives us unique insight into the direction of compliance and evidence and achieving outstanding rating with CQC. Our entire support team have a care background, working across care settings in different roles. This enables us to give you a relevant, personal service where you can build up strong relationships with our support team members and making them a natural extension of your team. We cover the whole spectrum of care from Rota, Accounts, Chef, Family EMAR, Housekeeping and many more. This avoids the unnecessary duplication of working across multiple systems saving time and errors. You can then have full integration of all systems under one roof, making it easy from a management, training and support perspective as well.
We have many users joining us from using paper systems and finding that our system is the most simple, user friendly and offering the most value. However we have even more who have joined us from other systems. The feedback received from such clients is that with the other systems they have tried the service and the quality system was not what they expected or promised. This is something that we pride ourselves in; our level of customer service and support and that we will always do everything we can to deliver and keep our promises. Please listen to views of our clients in testimonials to see what they say about the customer experience.
We do not claim to be the authority on care and no one knows their residents better than the carers and managers themselves. We love to hear suggestions and feedback and are constantly incorporating new elements into the system. We have updates of new modules on a weekly basis. You can also make direct suggestions through our support ticketing system so we can get this feedback and interaction directly. The look and design of the system has been carefully thought through to offer an icon driven, colourful and interactive system. The system does not stand still and is constantly evolving with new features added all the time.
The amazing advantage Care Vision offers is complete integration across all systems. This makes it easier to learn, train and manage as you are not checking across multiple systems. We have studied and researched other systems and have taken feedback from users. The overall feeling coming from the feedback of other systems is that EMAR is too complex for staff to manage. Other comments include: ‘Our current EMAR does not offer the flexibility of paper mar if you make a mistake… adding medication at the weekends can be difficult and we have to revert to paper…The pharmacy complains that it takes them a long time to add medication to MAR and generate barcodes for complex dosing. The system cannot handle dosage for warfarin and Parkinson medication.’
We have managed to reduce medication errors to virtually zero. We have a simple easy to use interface, which makes administration of medication effective and stress-free. The EMAR on Care Vision is seamlessly updated and reflects more information than any other EMAR on the market. We also offer information on side effects as well as important information at the point of administering and throughout so this becomes a great training tool. The ordering of medication could not be easier working with any pharmacy and including specialist pharmacy providers we have a range of options to suit your needs.
At Care Vision we take security of data as critical. We use AWS servers and have a back-up server in the event AWS goes down, which is highly unlikely. Our GDPR policy is displayed on our website and the system has been scrutinised by GDPR legal team to ensure compliance. We are the processors of the data and the home is the controller. We keep data up to 7 years and operate an internal archive which the client can access. We can also work on bespoke data set-ups using VPNS and other methods for those organisations that want a further tier of security. Please contact us for more options on this
We understand integrity, transparency and trust a key to delivering outstanding care. On important elements within the system, we have followed the established care process of controlled medication of dual signature and authorisation. This has been recognised by CQC and CIW as good practice ensuring safety. This helps put another tier of safety on important aspects relating to your care evidence. We have also pioneered a QR code system across Care Vision, which gives additional assurance of presence for certain things like night checks or care at the bedside. This can also assist from a level of input and need with residents when looking to increase fee level of funding.
We understand that mistakes happen so we do give opportunity to amend certain aspects, but these changes are fully tracked with accountability. You can also delete certain elements from the system but a full delete log is kept to ensure things can be audited and followed up on when required.
We have a dedicated family app available through play store for android and apple for IOS. This provides controlled access to care records and stats also the ability to use E Consent. This can save significant time in keeping loved ones informed on important updates or events. It’s a CQC requirement to inform of important events such as falls or hospital admissions yet this can take up time. There may also be occasions when the home have actively tried to get hold of someone to update them but were unsuccessful. The the app gives evidence of what message has been read and sent through family app which gives reassurance to families and inspectors that people are being kept informed. Our family app has become even more relevant during the Covid pandemic, when lack of contact has been prevalent, we also offer video calling via the system to keep people in touch. Care homes and inspectors alike are waking up to the reality of embracing technology even more so after recent events relating to COVID and visiting restrictions.
We offer various forms of training whether this be in person, via video call or through our video tutorials and webinars. This is delivered by skilled individuals with care experience providing relevant easy to understand information and guidance. All support is free and is offered in various forms, you can call us or use our ticketing system which enables a quick and direct response with the tech team. We arrange reviews with clients to go through progress and identify potential training areas. It is also great getting feedback and suggestions, our clients are our best developers.
We offer the staff app on android and IOS. This has no link or access to care records and is to be used on staff members personal devices. This is for viewing their rota, making day off and holiday requests, seeing predicted pay and annual leave. This ties in with the Care Vision ROTA module making things even easier from a payroll perspective. A housekeeping and maintenance app are also available, this gives the specific team access to essential facility and maintenance information but not access to confidential care records. This updates the maintenance log and prompts and reminds staff of outstanding issues.
We never stand still at Care Vision and are constantly developing, we had already developed and released COVID tracker a couple of weeks into the pandemic. Having our finger on the pulse, we link up with the university of Greenwich and the University of Worcester in terms of research to find the best new solutions. We have some centres and partners of excellence that are using the system in its entirety and constantly feeding back improvements and suggestions for future developments. Running services ourselves we react to any changes in government guidance or legislation as it happens. We can also work on bespoke projects and developing specific elements that are important to you. We can link with APIs of other systems when required, this can help tie in with your existing systems.
We like to offer flexibility and options to our users at Care Vision. We can help by providing devices which are robust and fast enough to cope with the rigours of working in a care environment. We have various options for payment on this as well which can be discussed. We also give the flexibility to source your own devices, this could be any android device. We have our own Care Vision protection which we offer to our clients for free, no additional charge for a third party licence. This enables devices to be protected and tracked. No images are saved on the device gallery to again prevent the potential risk of abuse. We have also created an Offline mode for when internet connection goes down or has been temporarily lost. Perhaps you may have black spots in your wi-fi infrastructure. Offline mode can help with all of this and still give direct access and ability to add notes.