Hydracare for Care Homes
Dehydration is one of the simplest illnesses to avoid but still leads to thousands of avoidable deaths each year, especially amongst our vulnerable elderly generation.
Just a 1.5% drop in hydration levels is classed as ‘mild dehydration’ and causes unwanted side effects with prolonged and more serious dehydration leading to life threatening situations.
No matter what care setting you are involved in, it is vital that hydration levels are kept to an optimum to keep bodily functioning properly and ensuring we look after the people.
Although dehydration is an easily preventable condition, staff shortages and inadequate staff education can lead to dehydration-related morbidity, mortality and impaired quality of life in institutional care settings such as hospitals, nursing homes and care homes
It is believed that 20% of older people living in UK care homes are dehydrated and at least 2 elderly patients a week die of hunger or thirst.
Dehydration has been highlighted as a common cause of admission to hospital in nursing home residents via UTI’s, falls and fractures. UTI’s and AKI’s are often over-diagnosed and over-treated where an accurate way of monitoring hydration could often be the solution.
Being properly hydrated also improves skin conditions with less wounds and marks. Bowel movement is also greatly worsened by dehydration and constipation is a huge problem in care homes especially for residents who take codeine for pain relief and other medication which makes constipation worse. Ensuring residents drink enough fluid reduces individuals dizziness and drowsiness and increases the cognitive function needed to see each persons character.
Within care homes, manual fluid balance sheets are still used which are time consuming and hard to keep accurate. On average, carer spend 6 minutes per day, per resident monitoring a residents fluid this way. This presents a huge potential saving in staff costs and would free up time for other care giving tasks.
As well as cost savings and a reduction in hospital admissions from care homes, using Aquarates Hydracare system to track fluid consumption can also reduce medication needs drastically and provide vital data required by the CQC for proving the care home is meeting their residents hydration needs.
Hear what some of our customers and users have got to say...
Gail Howard, Manager of Lakeside Care Home:
“At the moment fluid monitoring its a very time consuming and manual process. Carers have to hang around and watch how much residents drink during the drink rounds and guess the volume of liquid drank. Recording fluid intake this way is inaccurate and is easy to input false data onto the system.
Using the Hydracare system will eliminate this manual process and time consuming task. We want to focus on spending quality time with our residents, rather than watching what they do! My staff will be motivated by this new tool, knowing that they are able to look after the residents the best they can will excite them and will give them time to do other caregiving tasks.
Being properly hydrated should also improve residents cognition and hopefully they’ll be more likely to get involved with activities and stimulating exercises. We’re also really excited to give them more independence and allow them to drink their drinks at their own pace and not be worrying about having to constantly tell them to drink up so staff can add the information to our current system. Everyone is so busy so it will be great to free up the carers time.”
Omair Haider, Managing Director of Millennium Care:
“We chose to partner with Aquarate because we recognise how fundamentally important good hydration is to the overall well-being of those in our care. Research has shown the risk that poor hydration can have on cognition, falls prevention and energy levels for those in later life. We are impressed with the seamless integration of the Hydracup with real time data and technology that allows us to monitor and trend analyse data for more responsive care. All of this has been developed in an easy to understand system. In addition to this, we believe that by removing the need for manual entry of fluid intake our care and clinical teams are able to focus on more meaningful engagement and less task focused care for our residents”.
Get in touch...
Aquarate are rolling out the Hydracare system to care homes across the country ensuring smooth integration of data straight into their chosen care management system.
If you want to get involved and see how simply swapping to our cup can improve the peoples lives that you care for, get in touch for a demo.