dementia care software

Are your older care home residents getting the nourishment they need?

breakfast

It’s National Breakfast Week, which is a timely reminder of the need for care home residents to enjoy a healthy, balanced diet – not only when they get up in the morning but throughout the day.

This is particularly important for older people, according to an expert on nutrition and catering for a leading care provider.

“During the night your glucose levels have plummeted. The brain needs glucose to function and low levels affect our cognitive abilities: in other words you’re not at your sharpest, which can lead to falls and mistakes,” he explains.

He also makes the point that many older people suffer from loss of appetite, so eating sufficient calories to keep healthy and well-nourished can be difficult. People with dementia are especially at risk, as they often have little interest in food and may end up losing weight.

Make sure your care home record-keeping cuts the mustard

easyLog care monitoring software can be used to highlight meal preferences and log food consumed as part of the standard nutritional care plan. Records can be accessed from standard computers or on the move with a tablet or laptop, so carers can check a client’s nutritional requirements whenever they want at the touch of a button or screen, helping to ensure no detail gets overlooked.

For more information on how our care monitoring software can improve your record keeping and deliver person-centred care, visit our care home management pages.

Posted by administrator in Care home management, Care record management, Care recording, Nursing home management

Dementia Care Mapping software now a standard assessment tool in care-Log+

Dementia Care Mapping graph observations

DCM graph showing assessments over a period of time

easyLog’s market leading care-Log+ care home and supported living management software now includes the University of Bradford’s Dementia Care Mapping as one of its standard assessment tools. And, implemented on tablet PCs, it becomes a very powerful, convenient and easy to use platform for recording the results of Dementia Care Mapping observations.

Dementia Mapping seeks to record what everyday life is like for a person with dementia. It was developed by the University of Bradford’s School of Dementia Studies in the early 1990s. easyLog’s implementation of Bradford Dementia Mapping software on tablet PCs means that carers (or Mappers as they are known during observation sessions) have a simple and portable touch-screen platform on which to record their observations.

Our Dementia Care Mapping software presents the carer with a list of service users from which they select the residents they are about to observe and the length of time of the assessment. The tablet PC then displays a timeline for each service user broken down by defined period – for example five or ten minute blocks. Dementia Mapping then occurs by the carer selecting a Behaviour Category and the ME (Mood/Engagement value) score occurring at that moment. Several observations can be recorded at any point as different behaviours occur with the option to also add relevant comments.

The Dementia Care Mapping observations are automatically collated and presented in both numerical and graphical form across a range of dates or for a specific day. The Dementia Care Mapping software graphs can be displayed in line graph and bar chart format with optional selection of specific Behaviour Categories and ME values.

Dementia care is an increasing element of many of easyLog clients’ care services. And, according to statistics published in The Lancet in December 2014 (Global Burden of Disease Study 2013), the need for dementia care is only set to rise. The report is an in-depth look at changing patterns of 240 separate causes of death worldwide in 188 countries during the 23 years between 1990 and 2013 and highlights dementia as now being the third largest cause of death (source: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)61682-2/abstract).

graph showing DCM care assessment

Observations recorded on a graph using DCM

Posted by administrator in Domiciliary care and supported living, Nursing home management