Local Technology Helps Local Hospice Deliver Outstanding Care

St Luke’s Hospice Plymouth were awarded an outstanding rating by the Care Quality Commission in October last year. Since then they have been reviewing all of their services, making changes to provide the very best service striving to maintain the outstanding standard. One of the common themes identified by CQC was use of technology in the way services were being delivered.

St Luke’s had identified that they needed to address their reliance on one person to collate all of the quality and compliance data. They wanted something that would improve understanding and involvement across the organisation, helping to improve transparency and ultimately support service improvement.

Earlier this year St Luke’s, as one of the South West’s leading care providers, were approached by a local company with a brand new online system that could provide the type of support they were looking for.

The system, called Spark, is an audit, quality and inspection support tool. Spark allows all staff to record any sort of event, whilst providing real-time headline figures and graphed data, making it easier to identify patterns or risks. It also supports the service through the CQC Provider Information Return which is carried out annually.

St Luke’s have already seen benefits with staff members across departments being more engaged with quality and compliance practices. They have also been using the system in meetings to look at real-time data to help make more informed decisions.

St Luke’s Head of Quality and Compliance said, “Our staff think Spark is really user friendly and intuitive. It’s going to help shift the culture of the organisation, influencing a positive cycle of improvement with staff feeling more empowered to take responsibility and make improvements. It’s already started to breakdown barriers to data reporting.”

St Luke’s are confident that the benefits they are seeing from using Spark will help them keep their outstanding service rating and support their overall ethos.

Spark’s Operating Director, Rob Beaton said,“It’s been a fantastic experience working with the team at St Luke’s. We were confident that our online solution would provide great benefits and couldn’t be more happy now that it’s in place and they are reaping the rewards.”

Spark is owned by Footwork Solutions Ltd, a Plymouth based web application developer, focussed on products for the healthcare sector. Spark was live with it’s first client in February this year. www.spark-system.co.uk

St Luke’s Hospice Plymouth is an independent charity providing specialist care and support to people with progressive life-limiting illnesses in Plymouth, South West Devon and East Cornwall.