This is the heart of the system. Some key points are:
Clicking on the
symbol opens up the help for that item. The popup box that appears provides an explanation on what that item is and guidance on completion for each of the needs assessments. This guidance is reproduced at the end of this User Guide.
The date defaults to the current date. If the date of admission is within 30 days of the current date, additional skilled time is added for assessment and care planning. Similarly, if a planned discharge date is entered, additional skilled time is added. Note the flags Recent Admission and Discharge Planning show if these are active.
The Nursing Care Required key care factor is omitted for residential homes.
Resident name/ID: either the resident’s name or their unique identifier can be used, or both. Only one of these is compulsory to enter, and the resident information cannot be saved until one of these is entered. Gender is also a compulsory field.
Ref: this is an optional text reference field which can be used to record information or codes for each resident, and then group or sort the residents according to these codes in the ‘list’ functions. In the example below it has been used to show the source of funding.
Unit is a compulsory field if the resident is being admitted, but not for a TCI.
Daily One-to-One Care Hours: this is the number of hours per day where a member of staff is specifically allocated to be with the resident on a one-to-one basis for parts or all of the day. *New*: please note that decimals – parts of hours can now be entered, e.g. 10.25 = 10 hours 15 minutes. The + and – buttons increase and decrease the hours by 0.25 at a time, i.e. 15 minutes.
*New*: Daily Additional Skilled Hours: this is to input additional skilled time to perform specific interventions such as complex wound dressing. As DepenSys times are based on a single 24-hour day, where the intervention is not daily it is necessary to calculate the average daily time. An example is where a nurse carries out bilateral leg ulcer dressings every third day, and it takes one and a half hours; in this case 1.5 hours every third day would be 0.5 hours per day. As for 1:1 care, decimals can be entered and the + and – buttons increase and decrease the hours by 0.25 at a time, i.e. 15 minutes.
Accompany out of home: as for Daily Additional Skilled Hours, where the intervention is not daily it is necessary to calculate the average daily time.
Save as TCI: If a person is being assessed for a possible future admission (‘To Come In’ or TCI for short) click on ‘Save as TCI – YES’. The needs of such persons do not affect the dependency figures of the home. Otherwise leaving this field as NO will result in the resident being immediately admitted, influencing the dependency figures for the home. This is also how a person from the TCI list is admitted. Note the option to save as a TCI is removed once the resident is admitted.