Life Care Gaynes Park Manor Residential Aged Care
Life Care Senior Residents Enjoy an Active, Social Environment with Sonitor® Sense™ RTLS and ZulaFly Software.
No Longer Tethered to their Rooms, Residents Move Freely and Safely Throughout the Complex
Life Care Gaynes Park Manor is a purpose built, 96-bed multilevel residential aged care facility in Adelaide, Australia that specializes in dementia care. In a first for the Southern Hemisphere, Gaynes Park Manor’s modern design is a warm and inviting luxury apartment complex allowing residents with dementia to live in familiar, self-contained communities of 16 people and explore their surroundings without restrictions. Many studies have shown that the freedom to move has important health and psychological benefits and can create a positive and cheerful living environment and this was important to Life Care and its residents.
To support such a contemporary design that permitted residents with dementia to move freely throughout the complex while still ensuring the highest level of care and safety, Life Care was challenged to find a nurse call and wander management solution that could inconspicuously blend into the luxurious building aesthetic. After conducting a worldwide technology search, Life Care identified and selected Sonitor Sense Real-Time-Location System (RTLS), coupled with ZulaFly software, as the only product able to meet their requirements for safely providing mobility and location accuracy. Each resident is provided with their own, wearable RTLS-enabled tag that can initiate a call for assistance by the press of a single, easy to access button. Once activated, the nearest staff receive a notification through ZulaFly on their smartphone identifying the resident and their precise location.
By wearing a personal tag with instant access to help when needed, residents are no longer tethered to their rooms and are empowered to be active, make full use of the facility and to engage with fellow residents. This provides significant benefits to each resident as mobility is a key indicator in health outcomes. Families also appreciate the real-time information regarding the movement and activities of their loved ones. They feel confident in the care being provided and are happy to know that their loved ones are living active and engaging lives.
“I feel safe. I know when I press this button the staff will find me”
— Resident, LC GPM
Additionally, personalized tags powered by Sonitor RTLS, eliminate the need for traditional nurse call systems with call buttons on walls and pull cords that can give a clinical, hospital feel and increase fall risk. Sonitor’s infrastructure also met the requirement to blend seamlessly into the facility’s aesthetics, so from the moment residents enter a Life Care facility, they experience a luxury apartment environment. Sonitor’s RTLS provided additional safety benefits by reducing and/or eliminating the need for fall mats (that are themselves trip hazards and sources of falls). The tags worn by residents that may be a fall risk, provide early warning to staff when the resident is moving ensuring staff can be present and monitor or assist as necessary. In fact, as a result of installing Sonitor Sense RTLS, Life Care has seen a 15% increase in calls to staff for help and a 40% reduction in falls.
“Our residents are free, not tethered. They’re active and enabled.”
— Kane Pryzibilla, Director IT Operations
With the added safety and confidence that Sonitor Sense RTLS delivers, Life Care has been able to implement completely new care models. They can give more open access to residents throughout the facility knowing that their RTLS is providing the critical real-time monitoring and alerting to ensure residents are safe and able to move around freely and socialize in the community in the comfortable, community living room-like spaces. This freedom to move is a huge benefit to the physical and mental health of the residents.
Sonitor Sense RTLS also allows staff to discreetly monitor resident movement and proactively manage situations if residents are in areas of the facility not deemed safe. Since each resident has their own personal tag, alerts can easily be individualized. For example, if two residents are in the reception area, a resident with cognitive issues may trigger an alert to staff (determined by risk-level) while the other resident with no cognitive issues would not. Staff members can quickly and quietly locate and guide the resident to safety in a dignified way while also minimizing escape risks.
The RTLS benefits being experienced at Life Care are not just for residents. All staff are equipped with a nurse call app, powered by ZulaFly, on their smartphone, including voice-to-text on the spot note recording capabilities. As a result, they report a 20% reduction in nurse-call response times and an increase in the accuracy of each resident/staff interaction. This provides significant benefits for workforce planning, compliance, issue resolution and complaint management, maximizing efficiencies resulting in productivity gains.
“I could never go back to the old ways of doing things”
— Staff member, LC ALD
With all these benefits and results, it is clear that Sonitor Sense RTLS is a game-changing technology in the management of residential life and a competitive advantage for Life Care, allowing them to deliver enhanced peace of mind to families, providing improved safety and care strategies that optimize the dignity of residents, increasing resident’s independence and freedom to move while also positioning themselves as the Pinnacle of Care for aging patients.