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.
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:
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.
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: