Home Care Decisions App:  Your Opportunity to Lead the Way in Digital Innovation in Care Homes and Care at Home

Dear all

Scottish Care and the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI) invite you to become an early adopter of the new Home Care Decisions App.

What is the Home Care Decisions App?

This app is provided freely to all care home and care at home services in Scotland, as part of the national decision support programme funded by Scottish Government. It is available via the app stores by searching for “Home Care Decisions” and on the web at http://homecaredecisions.scot.nhs.uk

It delivers easy to use guidance and practical tools that improve safe, timely care and appropriate referral and escalation. The tools support care-workers in:

• Delivering day to day care
• Communicating in a shared language with the multi-professional team
• Learning and personal development. 

The app offers two toolkits:

• Care assessment and management– including Clinical Frailty Scale,  4AT tool for delirium screening, Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool, UTI assessment.
• Palliative and end of life care

Care-workers strongly endorsed the app in the initial pilot, with 76-84% saying they were likely to use the toolkits in their day to day work.

What does being an early adopter involve?

Scottish Care, DHI, and colleagues in other early adopter sites will support you to embed this app in your service so that staff, service users and the wider healthcare team benefit from these evidence-based tools. We will help you to:

• Put in place communication mechanisms to make sure all staff in your organization, including new recruits, know about the app and its benefits.
• Define and implement processes and supporting technology to ensure that all staff who would benefit from the app have easy access to it in the work place.
• Provide training, drawing upon national learning resources, to ensure that staff are confident in using the app.
• Agree metrics and methods to evaluate impact of the app on practice and outcomes and take these measures over an agreed evaluation period.
• Review evaluation results and agree improvements to the app and to the implementation process.

The learning you share as an early adopter will facilitate wider roll-out of the app in care homes and care at home services across Scotland.

To express interest in being an early adopter, please contact [email protected]

Home Care Decisions App flyer 19032022 v2