Telenursing provides 24/7 clinical support to retirement villages

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Summerset Retirement Villages has rolled out a telenursing project to provide round the clock clinical support and improve resident care across six villages in the South Island.

The aged residential care provider has also adopted PainChek technology to improve pain assessment, especially for residents with dementia who may struggle to communicate.

Craig Moore, continuous improvement and change manager at Summerset Group, says the virtual care project was introduced to address the growing need for continuous clinical support in their facilities.

The traditional setup at Summerset, like many other aged care providers in New Zealand, involves care centre managers and clinical nurse leaders providing guidance, primarily during business hours. 

However, there was a real need for clinical leadership and decision-making support after-hours. This was particularly challenging for new or inexperienced nurses working shifts outside business hours, who often found themselves needing immediate guidance, but had no one to turn to.

"When registered nurses start with us, they are quickly given large amounts of responsibility and accountability very early on, that can be quite overwhelming," Moore says. 

"We wanted to look at ways we could provide that clinical leadership and senior decision-making support to our care centers 24 hours per day."

A national clinical support service has gone live with a virtual team of experienced nurses supporting six sites across the South Island with 24/7 support.

Shai Venkitachalam is leading the new service, which she says ensures that the care centre nurses can make the right decision at the right time without having to contact centre managers who may be off shift. During the day, the service provides proactive consults.

Enabling senior nurses to work remotely has expanded the available workforce, and they provide coaching and mentoring for registered nurses in the facilities who need to upskill, Venkitachalam explains.

Summerset has also implemented PainChek, a technology that performs a facial scan on residents to look for small movements in the muscles in the face that indicate pain or unmet need.

Moore, who managed the rollout of PainChek, says the technology has streamlined pain assessments, making them more accessible and efficient. 

"The number of pain assessments done shot up by 300 percent overnight because it was so much more accessible," he says.

Venkitachalam adds that integration of the tool into Summerset’s resident management system has made pain assessment more accurate and consistent for residents.

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