Promoting Safety in Long-Term Care: Engaging Residents and their Families in Reporting Safety Concerns
Nursing homes, or special care homes, are residential long-term facilities that provide 24-hour professional nursing care and supervision in a protective, supportive environment for people who have complex care needs and can no longer be cared for in their own homes. The majority of long-term care residents are frail persons aged 65 years and older.
Long-term facilities deal with multiple factors that can affect the quality of care received by residents, including increasing complex resident care needs (including a high proportion of residents with dementia and behavioral issues), chronic understaffing, high resident-to-staff ratios, aging and inappropriate equipment and infrastructure. Safety concerns in long-term care homes include potentially life-threatening issues such as falls, equipment failures, physical environment, nosocomial infections and aggressive resident behaviors. Since the long-term care facility is the residents’ home, there needs to be careful attention paid to balancing safety and quality of life.
Maintaining a safe environment for residents is a top priority for long-term care homes. Improved communication of safety concerns between residents, their families and staff is central to the creation and maintaining of safe and secure environment. We are seeking an innovative solution to facilitate this communication in the form of an app that residents and families can use to relay their safety concerns in a timely and secure manner to administrators and staff who can use this information to effectively redress these issues.
Residents and families would download the app upon admission to the facility. The app would primarily for the use of family members (or those residents with smartphones or iPads) to communicate the following information through a companion administrator’s app or website:
- Time and date stamp
- Nature of safety concern using a drop-down menu with the option for free text
- Any actions taken by the person reporting
- Name of reporter
- Option for including a photo of the issue
- Option for recording and transmitting a verbal report in lieu of using text
There would need to be a mechanism to inform the reporter that the administrator had confirmed receipt of the communication of the safety concern. The administrator would most likely follow-up with the reporter in person and deal with the issue in the most appropriate manner.