Health Innovation Manchester has a wide-reaching programme of work to utilise digital technology and capabilities to better support care homes within Greater Manchester to care for their residents and coordinate care with the wider health and care system.

The current work undertaken by HInM builds on work undertaken during 2020-21 and the COVID-19 outbreak to provide an enhanced digital support package for care homes and the GM system.

Working with tech SME Safe Steps, support included the development of a digital COVID-19 tracker and outbreak management/reporting tool to track COVID-19 within care homes and coordinate effective care with GP practices, social care and hospitals to optimally support vulnerable residents. During 2020-21, the tool was deployed to more than 160 care homes across Greater Manchester, supporting more than 4,500 residents through more than 400,000 assessments.

Health and care staff supported the development of the tracker as part of a wider package of digital support. This package included enabling non-clinical staff to monitor and flag signs of deterioration early on, based on the national RESTORE2 mini clinical assessment (Recognise early soft-signs, Take observations, Respond, Escalate.), providing information about a resident’s end of life care documentation status and their wishes, and a falls prevention app.

The programme of work has also been supported by NHSX which provided additional funding to support the deployment of the tool as part of the national Innovation Collaborative and scaling of remote monitoring technology across England in response to COVID-19.

The focus of the project is to optimise the use of the digital toolkit within care homes in GM including:

• CV19 Tracker – Outbreak Management Tracker with daily reporting functionality – link through to clinical team dashboard view.
• Falls Prevention – Falls risk assessment tool and individual / care home level reporting enabling mitigating steps, escalation of care and thematic analysis to be undertaken. Built to NHS standards and aligned with NICE guidance, the tool allows carers to measure 12 key risk factors to enable early identification of high-risk citizens, and create a personalised action plan based on 50+ evidence-based interventions.
• Early detection of deterioration – Digitised RESTORE2 mini and SBARD communication tool facilitating the structured capture and sharing of the soft signs of deterioration between care homes and supporting clinical teams.

RESTORE2 stands for: Recognise early soft-signs, Take observations, Respond, Escalate. RESTORE2 uses three tools (Soft Signs, NEWS2 and SBARD) which when used in unison create a robust process for early identification of the signs of deterioration and appropriate and timely escalating (if required)

RESTORE2 mini is a condensed version of the full RESTORE2 tool – ideal for introducing care and residential homes that are currently unable to measure vital signs to the concepts of soft signs and SBARD structured communication. It is designed to act as a stepping stone to the adoption of the full RESTORE2 tool. It’s also great to keep by the telephone/ computer to support staff to communicate effectively.

Find out more about RESTORE2 and RESTORE2 mini