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Polly Esplen

‘Outstanding’ Children’s Hospice makes a success of The Care Database

Claire House Children’s Hospice helps seriously and terminally ill children live life to the full by creating wonderful experiences and bringing back a sense of normality to family life. By providing specialist nursing care and emotional support they help families smile again when life could not get any tougher.

Claire House received an ‘Outstanding’ CQC rating in their latest inspection and we were delighted to see how The Care Database helped Claire House achieve this rating. Here is an excerpt from their CQC report:


We recently spoke with Janet Sutherland Oakes, the Director of Clinical Services at Claire House and asked her how implementing The Care Database had affected their hospice:

excerpt from Claire House CQC Report
Excerpt from Claire House CQC report

Q. What efficiencies have Claire House seen since they adopted The Care Database? A. It certainly saves time accessing and updating records and it is considerably easier to review records now that we have everything in one place. During Covid, it was important for us to reduce the amount of time that parents had to be in the hospice. To do this, we introduced a pre-admission team pilot. This team was able to contact all families pre-admission to review and amend the care plans within The Care Database remotely. They were also able to review the medications required for the child’s stay and follow up on all information required to support medication changes. This procedure has made it much more efficient for the non-medical prescribers to complete all admission medication charts, as they do not need to chase up parents and professionals for that information. This process has significantly reduced the time required for admission. Since the process has been evaluated well by the care team and families, we have decided to formalise the team. The next step is to look towards using the facility for families to log in to The Care Database and review the care plans themselves, this will be a pilot first.

Q. What impact has there been on your care planning with The Care Database A. The Care Database gives us a flexible tool to design and implement our own care plans. Two senior members of our care team have completely revamped all our care plans and this has been received so positively that other hospices have approached the team to support them in the process of reviewing their care plans within The Care Database. Everything now sits in one place electronically, including all of our documents. This makes accessing records so much quicker and easier, especially given The Care Database is accessible from a tablet. Care plans can be downloaded at the beginning of each shift onto the nurse / HCA’s tablet to be used for reference throughout the shift. Q. What impact has The Care Database had on the communications between your teams A. We have worked hard to ensure that all teams document their care interventions on The Care Database. The premise being that If everything is documented correctly everyone has access to the same information at all times. During Covid, we have taken the opportunity to review the documentation of our counselling and therapy notes, particularly in the light of confidentiality and information governance requirements. We have had a number of Subject Access Requests (SAR'S) over the last 16 months and having all the records in one place within The Care Database has made this process so much easier than with paper records or a hybrid approach. Q. The last 15 months have been a difficult period for organisations due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Has The Care Database helped during this period? A. Because The Care Database is web-based and accessible on a laptop and a tablet we found that staff could work at home efficiently over a 24/7 period with secure access to all patient records in one place. We have made really effective use of the the bookings functionality within The Care Database enabling us to monitor activity and cancellations throughout the Covid-19 period. It has enabled us to completely transform our bookings process, with the care administrator and lead nurse working closely to coordinate planned and unplanned care. This allowed us to return to planned respite care in safe 'bubbles' as soon ass this was possible and really supported us to not have to cancel planned care to be able to respond to unplanned/end of life care.

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