Aquarate is supplying care homes across the country with its simple yet innovative smart cup to revolutionise the way hydration is monitored within care.
Aquarate is working with the award-winning Millennium Care and rolling out our Hydracare system at several care homes across Lancashire. We interviewed Gail Howard, Care Home Manager of Lakeside Nursing and Residential Home to discuss her view on the management of dehydration in care homes and how they think our Hydracup will improve residents’ lives.
Millennium Care takes an innovative approach to care and are keen to continuously develop their services using the best technology available. During COVID, it has been difficult to implement improvements, but they are now keen to further develop their tailored care plans using Aquarate’s Hydracare.
Even during COVID, the Lakeside team thought outside the box and had a beautiful visitation lodge installed so isolated family members could visit their loved ones. Lakeside had their ninetieth birthday and a seventy-first wedding anniversary in the lodge during the pandemic where families could still join and celebrate together.
How do you currently monitor fluid intake at Lakeside? What does this involve?
At the moment, it is a very time consuming and manual process. Carers must observe how much residents drink during the drink rounds and estimate the volume of liquid consumed. They must then enter each resident’s consumption into our CareDocs system which takes time, before returning to their care tasks.
Recording fluid intake this way is inaccurate and it is easy to input false data onto the system. I have to then log on and edit any records that need amending, rather than the care staff being able to do this themselves. Using the Hydracare system will eliminate this manual and time-consuming process. We want to focus on spending quality time with our residents, rather than watching what they do!
What made you decide to introduce Hydracare into your care home?
Omair Haider, Managing Director of Millennium Care, really thinks about the future and embraces any new technology that he feels could solve outdated problems. He is always looking for innovative ways of replacing standard procedures and takes the initiative to find products that will help. If he thinks something is going to make someone’s life better or the lives of our staff easier, he grabs it with both hands!
My staff will be motivated by this new tool, knowing that they are able to look after the residents the best they can will excite them and will give them time to do other caregiving tasks.
It is great that Hydracare can be personalised to each resident too. I have one gentleman here who is on restricted fluid so having this option for him will be great to help monitor his intake and for staff to be notified once he has reached his limit. We cannot wait!
What do you think the benefits will be when you introduce Hydracare? What impact do you think it will have on both the care staff and residents?
There are so many benefits. For residents, there will be a reduction in UTIs, less falls, and skin conditions should improve with less wounds and marks. Bowel movements should also improve. Constipation is a real problem in care homes especially for residents who take codeine for pain relief and other medication which makes constipation worse. They need this vital fluid to keep things moving. Once residents are more hydrated, they will be better at going to the toilet and will not be as frustrated.
As the NHS is under even more pressure to save money, prescription budgets are getting tighter, and we are finding that it is more difficult to get certain medication for dietary needs. It would be great for our patients not to have to take as many prescriptions and we believe that being able to monitor their hydration better will result in this. The less medication our residents have to have, the better! Antibiotics can weaken their immune system and we want to try and support the NHS as much as we can.
Being properly hydrated should also improve their cognition and hopefully they will be more likely to get involved with activities and stimulating exercises.
We are also really excited to give residents more independence and allow them to drink their drinks at their own pace and not be worrying about having to constantly tell them to drink up so staff can add the information to our current system. Everyone is so busy so it will be great to free up the carers’ time.
Do you think having this hydration data will help to meet CQC hydration standards?
Absolutely! Diet seems to be much more focused on and asked about until something goes wrong and residents get a UTI and become seriously unwell; then we are asked to show how we ensure residents are drinking enough and being cared for properly. That is when this data will become paramount.
As well as proving to the CQC our residents are properly hydrated, having this hydration data is so important to show to family members, too. Since COVID started, families have been particularly concerned about how much their loved ones have had to drink. We get questions all the time and we love the fact we can just print the resident’s hydration data out for the past week or month and give them a copy so they can see for themselves they have been drinking plenty and it has been recorded accurately.
Omair commented: “We chose to partner with Aquarate because we recognise how fundamentally important good hydration is to the overall wellbeing of those in our care. Research has shown the risk that poor hydration can have on cognition, falls prevention and energy levels for those in later life. We are impressed with the seamless integration of the Hydracup with real time data and technology that allows us to monitor and trend analyse data for more responsive care. All of this has been developed in an easy-to-understand system. In addition to this, we believe that by removing the need for manual entry of fluid intake our care and clinical teams are able to focus on more meaningful engagement and less task focused care for our residents.”
If you work within care and feel the management of hydration could improve the quality of life for your residents and carers, get in touch. Our smart cup records fluid intake 24/7 and gives you peace of mind, knowing your residents or loved ones are getting enough to drink and alleviating dehydrated related illnesses.
This article is from issue 20 of Health Europa Quarterly. Click here to get your free subscription today.
