By Alana Grant, QCS Product Manager, Social Care Solutions
The QCS Dementia Centre, which gives providers all they need to deliver and evidence great dementia care, has a useful new feature called Assign to help improve workload management.
Although managers could always conduct a PAL assessment for a service user directly from their Dementia Centre screen, they can now assign a particular individual to conduct the assessment.
And they no longer need to manually allocate staff every month (or however often required) to conduct assessments for each service user. Now, once assigned, the system will automatically repeat the appointment according to the frequency set up for each individual.
Once it is set up, it removes a huge part of manual administration. Managers will now be able to see a dashboard view of all the assessments staff have assigned to them and their status, giving them greater visibility and enabling better resource planning.
For caregivers, keeping abreast of assessment dates and times results in extra administration work. This is particularly true when they are assigned their PAL Assessments verbally, or through a digital or paper notification. And they often risk losing track of their assessment schedule when working in such a high-pressure environment.
With the new feature, carers can now easily check the My PAL Dashboard on their QCS mobile app to see which services users have been assigned to them, and when the assessment is due, within a 30-day timeframe. This allows them to plan their daily and weekly schedules much more efficiently. And being able to quickly access the app allows carers to see when their assessments are due — and conduct them too.
Ensuring regular PAL assessments is a critical part of providing good dementia care, so the ability to assign them to staff through the new feature encourages greater accountability.
Other benefits of the new feature include:
- Planning of workload and giving both staff and managers clear visibility.
- Managers will see all assessments and who they are assigned to from their PAL dashboard.
- Staff will see a personalised view from their mobile app with ONLY assessments that are due and assigned to them
QCS Dementia Centre fully incorporates the QCS PAL Instrument, the brainchild of world-renowned dementia specialist Jackie Pool. A reliable and validated tool for assessing cognitive ability, a PAL cognitive assessment identifies individuals at a Planned, Exploratory, Sensory or a Reflex level. It then provides caregivers with the appropriate help and guidance on how to best support the service user based on their assessment level.
Using the PAL Assessments dashboard, care managers can improve the management of their teams, their budgets and their recruitment strategies. They can review the history of all assessments by service user, care team, or location allowing them to evidence better person-centred and more consistent dementia care.
The QCS Dementia Centre helps by improving the understanding of a person’s dementia journey. It provides the toolkit underpinning a process for evidencing dementia care including an engagement measure, PAL Assessments and training and support materials. These can be used to tailor the care provided, the coordination of activities and the staff support and training all from one place.
For more information on the QCS Dementia Centre, go to www.qcs.co.uk/free-trial-dc/
