Innovation in care

We’ve introduced circadian lighting throughout Woodside Care Village (the first care home in the country to have this lighting throughout all resident areas) after a successful trial on one household at Drovers House. Circadian, or human-centric, lighting follows a daylight rhythm, with brighter, white light during the day and a softer, orange light in the evening which tells the body at a biological level that it’s time for sleep.

Our trial at Drovers House showed a range of impacts for residents with a reduction in sundowning, improved sleep and a reduction in the use of some medications. We’ve seen similar results at Woodside Care Village and are now working on a PhD with Oxford University into the benefits of circadian lighting for people with dementia living in residential care.

In most care homes, care staff spend their night shifts opening the door to every resident’s room to check that they’re okay. This often wakes up residents who then try to get out of bed, creating a falls risk. Or at the very least, these checks frequently disturb their sleep. This upsets their natural day/night rhythm resulting in a range of negative health and wellbeing impacts.

We installed our first acoustic system at Drovers House as a trial in 2016 - in fact this was the first use of acoustic monitoring in the UK, a system that has been used in Europe for decades. The system, used with resident consent, listens for noises from each room, sending an alert to a central monitoring system if a sound threshold is broken. The monitoring carers can respond appropriately and send a carer if they're needed.

Within a year we evidenced a 34% reduction in night-time falls. This was because people were left to sleep undisturbed by door-knocking, and we could get to them quickly if they needed our help. Because people were sleeping better they were more alert during the day, ate better and did more exercise. This resulted in an overall reduction in falls, over days and nights, of 55%.

We introduced cameras as another trial in 2017, starting with six residents at Castle Brook. Demand for cameras from customers quickly grew because they could see that being able to see what was happening in the room gave the night staff even more information to inform their care decisions. The camera is not on all the time and does not record - it simply provides a live feed when a noise trigger from the room is checked by the night monitoring team. The addition of cameras has helped to reduce falls at night even more, and shown that some incidents, that were previously unwitnessed and therefore had to be treated as a fall, are in fact not falls, for example, someone lowering themselves safely to the floor. This reduces unnecessary calls for ambulances and the emotional worry that an unwitnessed event has for everyone concerned.

More and more providers are now adopting acoustic monitoring across the country. And the NHS Digital Transformation Fund has awarded grants to install this technology because reducing falls in care homes benefits the wider healthcare system.

There are 150,000 vacancies in social care across the country (2023). At WCS Care we’re bucking the trend by supporting our staff to have more control over their work/life balance through the use of new technology, and introducing a new mobile carer role which is, and has, nearly completely stopped our use of external agency.

After downloading the BookJane app to their phones, staff can see all of their shifts easily, as well as open shifts that are still available, giving them the opportunity to choose how much they work and earn, picking up additional hours, and all too importantly, at times that suit them. By saving on expensive agency staff we now pay more than agencies do and have been able to attract the very best staff who would not have worked for us before in our new role of mobile carer.

These amazing workers choose their shifts through our app and aren’t tied down to any one of our homes, so they still have the freedom of the open road while benefiting from everything that comes with a contract of employment. This work was recognised with the Leaders in Care Innovation in Care Homes award 2023.