Nesoddtunet Care Home is idyllically located at Nesodden outside Oslo in Norway, with a view over the Oslofjord to the west and glimpses of Oslo city centre to the north. The Care Home has over 300 employees and a total of 122 care home rooms spread over nine households and three buildings. They have both short-term places, accommodation for long-term residents and an offer for those with dementia and cognitive impairment.
A few years ago, Nesodden local authority carried out a survey of the needs in health and care. The central questions were: «What are the needs of the residents, staff and relatives, and how can we meet these needs?»
– In this process, we saw early on that we needed to do something with the nurse call system at Nesoddtunet Care Home. In particular, how we should improve patient safety by giving patients more and better opportunities to notify the staff, if necessary, says Stig Henning Morken, adviser and project manager in Nesodden local authority.
Like so many other care homes, Nesoddtunet also had a traditional nurse call system with pull cords by the beds and in the bathrooms, as well as some pull cords in common areas and an old-fashioned panel in the corridors. When resident needed assistance, they would pull the chord, prompting an alarm to go off in a nurse’s station and the staff had to rush to the resident.
– The obvious disadvantage of this system is that if something happens, the patient must be near a pull cord to be able to notify that he or she needs help. If one fell too far from the pull cord, the patient had a problem. There were also significant limitations in the supervision; the moment an employee left a room, it was impossible to know what happened in that room afterwards, explains Morken.
Good experiences with working digitally first
Konrad Dawda is a trained nurse and has worked at Nesoddtunet since 2007 and is now head of two departments at the care home. He is full of praise for Sensio's products and solutions.
– We are getting older, we are living longer and there are not so many of us who work in health and care. Sensio's products are good support for us to be able to deliver patient safety, and therefore something I strongly recommend, he says.
All employees at Nesoddtunet Care Home work according to the «digital first» method. This means that they receive the patient alarms in Sensio Pocket on the work phones they carry with them. Then, they consider first carrying out digital supervision and then whether there is a need for physical supervision.
Sees a big difference in patient safety
The safety sensor RoomMate automatically detects risk situations in the resident’s room, such as the resident having fallen, being in the bathroom too long or leaving the room. Based on individual settings for each resident, the alarm goes off and the employees are notified via Sensio Pocket on their work phones.
Ihor Turkevych, auxiliary nurse at Nesoddtunet Care Home, agrees that the working method with digital supervision has given good results.
– Digital supervision and RoomMate have given us a better overview and better control. By being able to carry out digital supervisions via Sensio Pocket, there is less stress, better workflow and we have more time to help the patients who need it most, he says.
Turkevych is also a super user of the Sensio system and contributes to the training of colleagues.
– Everything that is new takes time, but there has been a lot of commitment. We have seen a big difference in resident safety and are very satisfied, he says, and adds that he does not quite understand how they managed in the past without Sensio.