Technology leading the way for safety first aged care

With a massive shake up to the norms inside residential and home aged care, where do these organisations go from here to ensure they deliver safe, quality care? 

Technology is a key component to ensuring safety for both employees and the residents in their care. 

UKG’s Head of Healthcare for ANZ/SEA, Darren Kilmartin, speaks about the critical urgency of having the right systems in place to meet safety requirements in modern aged care facilities. 

“We’re seeing the need for technology come even further to the forefront, especially following the pandemic. The visibility it provides has become critical to providing a safe environment,” says Mr Kilmartin. 

“Technology is assisting in the management of infection control, minimising the risk of any spread, and in rostering shifts to ensure the highest quality of care can be delivered.”

Take employee contact tracing for example; employers now have the ability to analyse their employees’ time and attendance data that has been collected via their workforce management solution. 

This data can help rapidly identify potential contacts who were working alongside other employees that may have been infected or exposed to any type of infection, and assists with timely contact tracing. 

Open communication and transparency, supported by workforce management solutions, enable potential health or safety hazards to be flagged and addressed in a timely fashion. 

Aged care provider, SummitCare, is a customer of UKG and began leveraging attestation technology to record, manage, and action daily occurrences, such as the health status of each employee in its aged care homes. 

Chief Financial Officer of SummitCare, Glenn Scott, says, “We now have a tracking mechanism in place to protect our staff and residents.”

Additionally, employees attesting to their own health status, as well as their experience on shift, helps to keep everyone safe.

The Aged Care Royal Commission has emphasised the importance of having the right staff in the right place, at the right time. 

Skills-based rostering revolutionises this process by automating the scheduling of employees with critical skills and certifications to the correct shifts. Automation not only eliminates complexities and risk, it reduces administrative burdens to allow staff to spend more time with patients, residents, and their families. 

Staff-to-resident ratios may not be mandated in aged care, but trailblazers in the industry know that high quality, safe care is the key to success. 

Mr Kilmartin says, “Intelligent, predictive scheduling is a fantastic tool to leverage to get these ratios right.

“Visibility into the allocation of your workforce is more than a business need. It’s critical to maximising safe care.” 

UKG believes they can predict with certainty that resident and workforce safety will maintain a significant role in aged care for years to come. 

Workforce technology enables aged care organisations to drive better employee engagement, experiences, and productivity, and in turn put safety first now and into the future.

To learn more about how UKG can help, visit their website.

At UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group), their purpose is people. Built from a merger that created one of the largest cloud companies in the world, UKG believes organisations succeed when they focus on their people. As a leading provider of HCM, payroll, and workforce management solutions, UKG delivers award-winning Dimensions and Ready solutions to help tens of thousands of organisations across geographies and in every industry drive better business outcomes, improve HR effectiveness, streamline the payroll process, and help make work a better, more connected experience for everyone.