‘Outstanding’ live-in care in Dorset

A perfectly matched care team

A live-in care arrangement in Dorset usually involves two carers working on a two-week rotation.  They will be carefully matched working with you and your family to ensure they are able to meet not just your care and support needs, but are closely aligned with how you wish to live your life, sharing common interests, personalities and backgrounds.  In the rare situation, the match does not work out we will happily work with you and your family to find the care team that does.

Clinical care developed and supported by experts in their field

Supported by our specialist in house nurse, Dr Jane Pritchard and our central senior management team, many of whom are nursing professionals, our professional care teams can support people with nurse-led care in the comfort of their own home.  All our professional carers are qualified to manage and administer medications, and support with several complex medical interventions.

We understand that medical care can require equipment and other adaptations to the home.  Our dedicated Occupational Therapist (OT), Jackie Cooper, will not only liaise with doctors, district nurses and NHS OT’s and physiotherapists, she is also on hand to be able to conduct a thorough OT assessment to facilitate fast discharge from hospital if required and will coordinate any requirement for equipment, so you can get home as quickly as possible to be cared for comfortably in familiar surroundings with all the care you need.  These specialists ensure our professional carers in Dorset are focused on and supported to deliver a holistic and multi-disciplinary approach to caring for your loved one.

Innovating care delivery through technology

Unlike any other live-in home care provider in the UK, we have invested in creating our own market-leading technology to further enhance our service. Through the development of an online community for our clients, their families and our professional carers, we are proactive and responsive to emerging issues, whilst enabling the softer social benefits that technology brings.  The secure platform is focused on ensuring our carers are equipped to effectively deliver the high-quality care our clients should expect, whilst delivering improvements in health outcomes.  Our families in Dorset can access important information about the care of their loved one, providing a reassuring window into the care they are receiving.

Our professional carers use a dedicated community through a Chromebook to complete daily care records, update care plans, monitor nutrition and hydration and manage medications proactively with safety features ensuring accurate administration. This allows us to effectively monitor the health outcomes of our client’s care, so we can prevent and respond to incidents and ensure the very highest quality of care is always provided.  The online community also allows our professional carers to network, support each other and share best practice, whilst facilitating a connection which is so important for a remote workforce.

For families who may live some distance away from their loved one, they can access care plans, care records and a calendar of events as and when they wish, offering much-needed peace of mind.  We are proud that this community offers families a transparent and immediate insight into our service.  The technology also provides families with reassurance that any cash handled by our carers is being managed safely and accurately, whilst enabling them to manage practical arrangements, such as food shopping remotely. They can also connect with our other clients’ families who may well be in a similar situation as themselves, so they can share their care experiences and support one another. 

Our professional carers will utilise the technology for their clients’ socialisation and enjoyment – everything from video calls with family members so they feel connected, online shopping to general web browsing.

Improving health outcomes

At The Good Care Group every decision is driven by delivering improved health outcomes for our clients.  Through our dedicated and committed approach to providing high quality care to our clients and the use of our market-leading digital technology, we can evidence year on year significant improvements in our clients’ overall health and wellbeing.

Unique to the live-in home care market, the technology enables us to digitally monitor health outcomes allowing us to effectively predict risk and shape the care we provide.  We know, for example that urinary tract infections (UTI’s) are one of the leading causes of hospital admissions for our clients, so we equip our carers with handheld testing kits to proactively monitor our clients for infections.  

We then benchmark our data to demonstrate how effective our care is in improving the quality of our client’s lives in the context of other types of care provision, for example care homes.

Our health measures are focused on achieving the following:

• Promoting wellbeing, independence and enjoyment
• Reducing behaviours that challenge through implementation of psychosocial techniques
• Reducing and eliminating antipsychotic drug use
• Promoting excellence in nutrition and hydration
• Reducing and preventing falls in the home
• Reducing hospital admissions and re-admission
• Reducing UTIs and chest infections
• Reducing carer stress

We are proud to be transforming health outcomes for those who require care at home. In 2020 our care teams achieved the following outcomes for those they cared for:

Infection Prevention

Proactive Monitoring of Chest Infections

Our vigilant carers manage early signs of illness, such as chest infections enabling timely intervention to avoid unnecessary hospital admissions. This has resulted in a 28% reduction in chest infection hospital admissions.

Reducing urinary tract infections (UTI’s)

Through enhanced training our professional carers can perform urinalysis tests. This means they can provide timely information to GP’s, enabling a quick diagnosis and treatment. 80% of our clients were diagnosed in 2020 using urinalysis kits. Through the introduction of testing, our clients are three times less likely to require emergency interventions involving a 999 call or ambulance call out when a urine test is completed.

Unrivalled falls prevention programmes

In England alone, 30% of people over the age of 65 fall at least once a year and for those 80 and over it is 50%. By comparison, only 7% of our clients aged 65 and over fell at least once, and that was only 6% for those aged 80 or over.

Our clients are six times less likely to suffer a serious injury as a result of a fall than residents living in a residential care home. This is a result of our quality one-to-one care, which just cannot be achieved in even the very best care home, and our effective personalised falls management programmes.

Working with our in-house Occupational Therapist, we identify clients who are ‘frequent fallers’ and through an intensive and personalised approach to falls management resulted in  50% of our clients never falling again.

A specialist pathway for palliative care at home

For those with a life-limiting illness or a terminal condition, most of us given the choice would wish to end our days in the comfort of our own home. However, the percentage of people in the general population who can do that is as low as 19%. By comparison, our approach to one-to-one palliative care at home has enabled 81% of our clients to pass away in the place they love most – their own home.

Effective pressure sore management

Our high-quality home care provided by dedicated and professional carers has seen a staggering reduction in pressure sores in those we care for when compared to both hospital and care home settings. Comparative data shows that you are 13 times less likely to acquire a pressure sore in The Good Care Group's care when compared to a hospital and 26 times less likely when compared to care home rates.

Efficient management of medications

Our digital technology is used proactively to effectively support safe administration of medications, which has seen error rates of 2.4% compared to a 22% error rate in care home settings.

Reducing the use of antipsychotic medication for those living with dementia

The use of antipsychotic medication to treat dementia symptoms has been increasingly challenged over the last ten years, as they have been shown to be harmful for people living with dementia and are at times prescribed unnecessarily. Through our approach to professional and specialist one-to-one care for those living with dementia, and the use of our market leading digital technology (eMAR) our clients are four times less likely to be prescribed antipsychotic medication than residents of care homes.