Blog

New research into what Australians think about residential aged care was unveiled at a seminar, ‘Aged Care: How well do you know your customer?’ at Macquarie Graduate School of Management in Sydney on 27 November 2014.

Nearly two thirds of Australians who had placed a relative in residential aged care in the last five years were happy ‘overall’ with the facility but a third thought services could be improved, particularly leisure/lifestyle activities (39%), managing incontinence (35%), avoiding falls (35%) and managing mobility (34%).

The meeting was hosted by Simavita which pioneered a technology known as SIM® (Smart Incontinence Management) that is increasingly being used by aged care facilities to improve their delivery of quality care.

Twilight Aged Care introduced SIM® over two years ago as part of its overall continence management plan.  Twilight Aged Care CEO, John Stuart, who presented a case study on the use of SIM®, said that aged care services had to embrace technology if they wanted to appeal to today’s customer.

“We’ve found that SIM® enables staff to tailor care to resident needs and schedule toileting for when it’s needed which helps staff use their time more efficiently. This approach also respects resident privacy and dignity and removes the discomfort and embarrassment of manually checking incontinence pads. With SIM®, we’ve seen less skin and urinary tract infections and fewer falls associated with rushing to the toilet.

“When new customers ask us what makes us different, we explain how technology is being used to match quality care to the individual’s needs, which is exactly what this new research identified as a deciding factor in choosing a facility.”

Incontinence was a contributing factor in 30% of decisions to place a relative in care and in 18% of cases it was considered the tipping point. When incontinence was already a factor, bladder issues was the tipping point in 42% of admissions.

Aged Care Insite also profiled this event.  Read more here.