WCS’s innovation partners

WCS Care was the first care home provider in the UK to install CLB's acoustic monitoring system. Turned on at night, the system detects sounds in residents' rooms above pre-set, individual thresholds. When a sound is picked up, an alert is sent to the night manager who checks to see if the resident needs a carer's help. Because alerts are constantly monitored we don't need to do hourly door checks, and instead send staff to exactly where they are needed. This means other residents can sleep undisturbed.

We're now also giving residents the option of having a camera attached to the system. This lets us visually check if a resident needs us. For example, whether the sound we heard was them just turning over in bed or actually getting up. Using acoustic and visual monitoring has been evidenced to reduce falls by up to 75%. And a good night's sleep has a number of other health and wellbeing benefits for residents too.

Using an easy to use app that gives staff control over their worklife balance, we’ve been able to attract and retain staff who can choose when and how often they work and how much they earn, picking up shifts around their other life commitments. Flexibility is the new workplace currency.

At WCS Care, we use Person Centred Software's electronic care planning to record our care. Using handheld devices, carers capture the care they deliver in the moment quickly and effectively, building a detailed picture of each resident's care. And for managers we've a suite of reports that give them instant access to everything they need to know about their residents' health and care.

At Castle Brook and Woodside Care Village we've done away with the central catering kitchen and are, instead, cooking food in the ovens on each household. Using Apetito's range of meals and preparing food in this way means we're able to enhance residents' dining experience in a number of ways - not least of which is the fact that people can smell food being cooked, stimulating their appetite and preparing them to eat. We can also offer a wider choice of hot meals at each sitting and be more flexible about when residents have their main hot meal of the day.

We’ll also be bringing Apetito to more of our residential homes after a successful trial at Attleborough Grange in Nuneaton.