In collaboration with Barclays Digital Eagles

Summary

Care home residents had poor connectivity to services during lockdown and staff were often using their own phones to make vital connections.

Problem

Care home residents had poor connectivity to services during lockdown and staff were often using their own phones to make vital connections to clinicians and family.

Meanwhile, the community healthcare teams were unable to perform their usual tasks to keep residents healthy, such as skin integrity checks, foot care and diabetes management.

It was felt that connecting care home staff and residents to the NHS via video may even have been a temporary 'sticking plaster' approach with a lack of any other long term use case

Solution

We quickly developed a standard operating procedure, identified care homes in need and deployed technology and training to those that needed it most.

We partnererd with Barclays Digital Eagles to help provide assistance and we connected 100 donated iPads with 100 care homes and included 100 free training packages for care home staff.

20-30 use cases were found for the donated technology. This was fed back into decision makers who used the learning from our experience to shape regional roll-out of tech to care homes. This meant that through the most desperate of times, residents have still been able to stay connected to loved ones and access the healthcare they need.

This approach has gained significant traction, resulting in a national care home programme.