FREE February Activities Calendar for Care Providers! - Person Centred Software

February's Activities Calendar is here!

Here's a preview of this month's activities:

• No One Eats Alone Day
  Have a communal meal with residents and colleagues, encourage them to get to know each other better. 
• Time to Talk Day
  Get everyone in the care home talking to each other or in groups today.
  Learn why Mental Health Matters by clicking here.
• Valentines Day
  With an Activity Pack, Quiz, Wordsearch and more, enjoy Valentines Day with your residents on our Wellness & Activities Platform!

Click here for more info!

Holiday Cards
Give the residents help with holiday cards – writing, addressing, or sealing envelopes.

Download January's Activities Calendar

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Are you interested in 4,000 more activity ideas?

Our Wellness & Activities Platform empowers residents and staff in social care settings by enabling them to take part in specialist activity programmes 24/7! Our content is updated daily and includes:

• Activity Books and Specialist Activity Programmes
• Quizzes
• 5-10 Live Events per week including exercise sessions, wellbeing and mindfulness sessions, live singing events and more
• Exercise Videos and Tutorials
• Weekly Newspapers
• A calendar with multiple Activities for each day of the year,
  and so much more!

There has never been a better time to get our market-leading Wellbeing & Activities Platform and access over 4,000 activity ideas, exercise videos and more! 

Learn More Here

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For your chance to win 3 months free access to our On-Demand Activities & Wellbeing Platform or a Hobbycraft voucher, you just need to showcase all the wonderful activities that you are doing with your residents on social media.

We will pick a winner every month so make sure you use the hashtag #KeepingResidentsActive and tag Person Centred Software and Oomph! Wellness in your posts. Good luck!

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#KeepingResidentsActive winner for December!

Congratulations to Moorland Gardens Nursing Home for winning December's #KeepingResidentsActive competition! Keep sharing your social posts using the hashtag #KeepingResidentsActive to be in with a chance of winning next month!

Content provided by Person Centred Software.

Discover our leading dependency and staffing tool for care homes - Person Centred Software

Care homes can now provide better care by assessing residents' needs, determining the time and skills required to meet those needs, and comparing the suggested staffing levels with the actual level, enabling care homes to quickly calculate within a minute, staffing requirements based on residents' needs.

We're delighted to be able to provide assistance to care homes in addressing a highly prevalent problem that significantly affects their CQC Assessments and the overall quality of care. With over 700 care homes now using the system, will your care service be next?

Learn more by clicking here!

How are care providers benefitting from the system?

It is difficult for providers to track and understand what level of care is required, our staffing tool helps provide that transparency, and works well for both residential care homes and nursing homes! Some other benefits include:

• The correct type of staff giving the right type of care!
• Having the right skills mix to deliver good care, meeting the needs of residents!
• The accurate number of staff on shift: Avoiding under or over staffing.
• Demonstrate compliance: It satisfies regulatory requirements and improves the ability to report on dependency and accurate staffing levels for care quality assessments as it summarises resident needs to care hours.
• Better Transparency: Allowing care providers to optimise their staffing levels and resources!
• The only product of it's kind in the social care market in the UK.

Learn more by clicking here!

If you have any questions or would like some further information, you can book a free consultation with one of our friendly product specialists by getting in touch here.

Content provided by Person Centred Software.

Sustainability - Lorcan Mekitarian, chair of the Cleaning & Hygiene Suppliers Association

Sustainability continues to be one of the biggest challenges facing businesses, both large and small. Adopting products and services that have the minimum impact on the environment continues to be a top priority. It’s not surprising that sales and marketing messages shouting about ethical and environmentally sustainability are seductive.

We developed our Roadmap to Sustainability to support our members. It is founded on the principle of treading lightly in all areas of the business. It comprises five pillars: 

1. Product as it is received, used and disposed of by the end user.  
2. Packaging, covering all the packaging of a product, throughout the supply chain.  
3. Transportation.  
4. Social values, including mental wellbeing, personal development and the overall ethical approach of the business.  
5. Corporate environmental impact, covering waste, emissions and water.  

Our members, manufacturers and distributors, have now come together to offer guidance to buyers and end users on how to navigate the complexities of environmental and ethical sustainability. They addressed three key questions:

1. How can buyers identify and avoid greenwashing?
2. What are the major carbon-reduction initiatives in the industry?

Identify and Avoid Greenwashing

Buyers need to know and understand legislative developments.

They also need to know the true meaning of terms like ‘biodegradeable’, ‘compostable’, ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘natural’. For example, ‘biodegradable’ as it is applied to cleaning products, is defined in current legislation (Detergent Regulation (EC) No 648/2004 and corresponding UK post Brexit legislation).

All claims should be substantiated with reliable third-party comparative research, which is easily accessible by the user or buyer, including those that claim a comparison to other ‘toxic’ or ‘harmful’ products. The use of the phrase ‘non-toxic’ in the marketing narrative, can be misleading. Buyers or end users may interpret it as zero risk, despite warnings on the product about eye and skin irritation. It’s crucial to always consider context and Classification Labelling and Packaging (CLP) warnings on labels and product data sheets. When marketers use terms like ‘non-toxic’, they should have reliable scientific evidence to back up their claims. Transparent and accuracy matter.

Buyers must also consider the whole lifecycle. Greenwashing claims often focus on one aspect of the product’s lifecycle while ignoring others such as transport, disposal or the use of hazardous materials. Never take sustainability claims at face value. Challenge them. Ask for evidence. In particular, beware absolute claims. It is impossible to have, for example, zero environmental impact or be 100% sustainable and no plastic sack is made from 100% recycled material.

The Major Carbon-Reduction Initiatives

Major carbon reduction initiatives focus on the move from a linear mode of ‘take, make, use, throw’ to a circular economy of re-use, re-manufacture, repair and recycle. Product design needs to minimize raw materials and support recyclability at the end of a product’s lifecycle.

The two big areas of focus for transport and distribution are the vehicles themselves and delivery efficiency. Investment in expensive electric vehicles may be attention-catching but there are important cumulative wins by improving delivery efficiency. Efficient route planning software can reduce transport miles and buyers accepting large, less frequent and less urgent deliveries can make a big difference.

Many manufacturing processes are energy intensive. Buyers need to seek manufacturers who are adopting renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power and investing in technologies and processes that improve energy efficiency. Measurement is also crucial. Manufacturers need to understand their baseline if they are to reduce Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions.  

Conclusion  

Ethical and environmental sustainability is a complex and challenging issue, but one that must be addressed. We are asking buyers of cleaning and hygiene products to put ethical and environmental sustainability at the heart of tenders. We ask them to require a sustainability strategy, which includes a life cycle assessment of carbon emissions, quantified and measured independently where possible. Asking about the resources committed to the strategy will indicate the serious suppliers. Our goal is that with this approach our industry will be a leader in ethical and environmental sustainability.

Click here to view the white paper.

Content provided by Lorcan Mekitarian, chair of the Cleaning & Hygiene Suppliers Association. For more information visit www.chsa.co.uk.
@CHSACleaning