A Bespoke Care App for Sanctuary

Sanctuary Care is a leading provider of care homes for elderly people. Staff provide a range of personalised long and short-term care in around 100 care homes across England and Scotland. Sanctuary required an electronic care planning application that would handle complex care needs and comply with care regulations.

Challenge: Improving the delivery of care services across Sanctuary’s care homes

Sanctuary staff were logging details about care plans for residents through an entirely paper-based system, which was a time consuming process. A number of off-the-shelf products were assessed and considered unsuitable for delivering the specific services required by Sanctuary.

It was intended that the new system would:

  • Be the central electronic system for all Sanctuary residents’ care plans.
  • Allow carers to add and amend information on a care plan at the point of care.
  • Alert staff to key information such as doctor appointments for residents.
  • Improve security; paper files with resident information would no longer be needed.
  • Free up carers time, allowing them to spend valuable time with residents, delivering care and support.

The Ghyston Approach: A leading care app

The project began with an in-depth consultancy and discovery phase to uncover the intricate requirements of the system. During this process, Ghyston and Sanctuary stakeholders worked closely together, running workshops with carers to make sure the user experience of the application was spot on.

As a result, Ghyston designed and built a mobile application using Xamarin, alongside a management and reporting website using React and Typescript, both backed by a .NET API server. A key focus for the application design was resilience and uptime. This included an offline-only mode and business continuity functionality to ensure carers still had access to key information in the case of network or power failures in care homes.

Ghyston built the system to allow full customisation of the care assessments workflow, enabling Sanctuary to meet the changing needs of care-giving without requiring complex application-level changes.

Outcome: Informed managers, empowered carers, and happy residents

The software has allowed Sanctuary to transform the way they operate in their homes. Carers have embraced the new system and managers have a better oversight due to real-time reporting.

The main outcomes include:

  • Care homes are no longer reliant on an insecure and time consuming paper-based system.
  • The application saves carers over one hour a day, which is quality time that can be spent caring for residents.
  • The ongoing costs of the system are minimal due to the inbuilt flexibility.
  • A number of care homes were awarded ‘Outstanding’ status by the Care Quality Commission as a result of implementing the new system.