Colten Care
Case Study
Colten Care
Dorset, Hampshire, Wiltshire, West Sussex
Explore how & why Colten Care care homes use Courtney Thorne Nurse Call Systems throughout all of their 21 care homes across the south of England.
A fundamental quality of a great care home is that it is both safe to live in and responsive to its residents’ needs. Indeed, so vital are the questions of safety and responsiveness that they are explicitly set down as key lines of enquiry in inspections by care sector regulator the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
At Colten Care, which owns and runs 21 care homes across the south, achieving the highest standards of safety and responsiveness is not only a demonstration of external compliance, but more importantly, an essential step on the company’s own continual journey to excellence.
Five of its homes have been declared Outstanding by CQC with others to be inspected all rated Good. This success, coupled with consistently high scores on the public review site Carehome.co.uk and the fact that all its homes are registered for nursing, makes Colten Care one of the top care home providers of its size in the UK.
To underpin their total focus on the individual care of residents, all home managers at Colten Care have access to group-wide operational support including nurse care technology solutions from Courtney Thorne. These are designed to collate and show homes’ responsiveness to residents’ call bells including whether any set time period for response is being breached.
A more automated approach to data management
In previous years, staff would manually count call bell breaches recorded on a physical print-out, divide these into separate times of day on a Word document and submit a home period report every four weeks to the Colten Care head office. Here, the operational and audit managers would analyse each home report in turn and use it to prepare a group period report identifying any areas of concern. Basic data needed for this was the total number of calls at each home, the average calls per day and the average response time.
The group report was returned to the homes up to six weeks later so they could check and assess how well they were performing when compared to other homes. The whole process was fraught with problems of consistency and took far too long to produce to be meaningful.
More recently, home administrators switched to a spreadsheet to insert the call bell data which they obtained via USB from a Courtney Thorne touchscreen server in each home. This was a more automated way of showing breaches logged at different times of the day, but it only went so far. It was still a time-consuming task for head office to collate, analyse and send back the data, so a waiting period before action could be taken continued.
The process also led to inaccuracies in the data and required training for the administration staff on how to compile it. A certain amount of IT knowledge and capability was demanded, and the need for a more user-friendly, efficient, dynamic and informative process was recognised.
"When it comes to CQC inspections, having instant access to reports helps prove our responsiveness. It's easy for our home managers to demonstrate how responsive we have been over any period in question." Elaine Farrer, Operations Director
Complete confidence in the accuracy and integrity of our data
The relationship between Colten Care and Courtney Thorne has evolved over many years with the introduction of many technological innovations along the way. To tackle the call bell response problem, Courtney Thorne’s Head of R&D, David Hollings, met Colten Care managers, including Richard Upshall from Colten’s IT Business support team, to discuss how to solve their need.
The challenge was to find a way to gather essential data quickly and accurately from each home, consolidate it and enable automatic collating, monitoring and analysis. David suggested Courtney Thorne’s CT Cloud be used – this has the advantage of enabling reports to be generated and shared automatically.
Colten Care Operations Director, Elaine Farrer, explained: “We piloted the CT Cloud at two of our homes, Braemar Lodge in Salisbury and The Aldbury, a dedicated dementia care home in Poole. The pilot lasted six months, during which staff interrogated the data and checked for discrepancies. Courtney Thorne then created an automated period report for us. Once we were happy with this, we rolled out the CT Cloud service across our remaining homes.
“The roll-out involved our IT team visiting each home to connect the Courtney Thorne touchscreen servers to our central IT network to ensure data could be uploaded autonomously. A few early discrepancies arose when all homes were connected, but David and his team responded swiftly to fix that and to maintain our complete confidence in the accuracy and integrity of the data.
“A few home managers and other senior managers took a little time to get used to navigating the system and needed some guidance to be able to generate their reports. All are now adept at drilling down into even the most granular data.”
A wide range of benefits across all Colten Care homes
Now that CT Cloud is up and running across all Colten Care homes, the benefits are clear:
- An improved understanding of when and where calls are originating and how well they are being responded to.
Cost savings in avoiding the time previously taken to generate breach reports. Administrators used to spend up to 30 minutes a day counting call bells. While this improved with the spreadsheet and USB approach, the time spent still amounted to several hours each period. Now, information can be collated with the click of a button. - Complete faith in the data with home managers confident in what they are saying when seeking to reassure relatives their loved one is being seen in a timely manner if concerns ever arise; they can do this instantly and accurately.
- Instant access to reports demonstrates responsiveness and safety to CQC.
- Until now, head office-based managers only had visibility of a home’s call bell data by visiting and sifting through paper records. The only real understanding was when monthly period reports were submitted or group reports collated. Now, they can access all information, from a quick overview to a detailed analysis of specific individuals, anytime, from anywhere.
- Users can drill down and look at call bell data in granular detail, with tiered reports that allow excellent visibility at every level.
- Accurate data and swiftly generated reports make it easier to share examples of best practice in call bell handling across all homes.
You can’t put a price on daily visibility
Summarising the success of the implementation and its benefits, Elaine concluded: “When it comes to CQC inspections, having instant access to reports helps prove our responsiveness. It’s easy for our home managers to demonstrate how responsive we have been over any period in question.
“At the same time, we can clearly show that our homes are very safe places. You can’t put a price on the visibility we now have on a daily basis. It means we can spot trends, hold staff accountable for breaches and identify good practice so we can confidently ask the question: ‘Why is this not always the case across our entire portfolio?’ We can see what is happening now, not just what happened before.
“We can adjust and improve staff allocation and deployment and improve our governance and quality assurance. We certainly recommend Courtney Thorne and the CT Cloud. Ultimately, it is helping us drive down response times, ensuring our residents receive the very best care in a timelier manner. It is playing an important supporting role in our objective of being our region’s care home provider of choice and employer of choice.”
Products Utilised in this Project
In our work with Colten Care, we utilised the following products, innovations, and solutions in order to bring help bring a better quality of care to their residents:
CT Cloud
Colten Care enhanced safety, responsiveness and reporting efficiency across its 21 homes by implementing CT Cloud. Replacing manual data collection and spreadsheets, CT Cloud delivers automatic uploads, real-time reporting and detailed call bell analysis. The result was faster response times, stronger governance, and greater reassurance for families. If you’re looking for similar results, CT Cloud provides the clarity and control to make it happen.
Our Other Care Home Partners
At Courtney Thorne, we have a wealth of experience in working with a wide variety of care home networks and operators across the UK and beyond. Since our foundation, we have built up an extensive portfolio of care home partners that have utilised our catalogue of nurse call systems and associated products. You can explore our most recent trade partner case studies.
