Singapore is projected to reach “super-aged” status in 2026, with 21 per cent of our population aged 65 and above, and around 1 in 4 citizens will be aged 65 and above by 2030.
While we hope most seniors can age in place during their golden years, it is inevitable that there will be a group of seniors who require nursing home care.
Nursing homes are long-term residential care settings that provide a range of services to residents who have little/ no family support and require assistance with most of their activities of daily living and daily nursing care.
It is timely now to assess how we can support nursing homes’ capabilities to meet the care needs of seniors effectively and efficiently, and their expansion to meet the expected rising demand in the future.
Vision For Change
In partnership with the Ministry of Health (MOH) and MOH Holdings, the Agency for Integrated Care (AIC) and five pilot nursing home sites envisioned new ways to drive organisation productivity by incorporating workflow improvement, adoption of technology and layout enhancements.
Titled Smart Workflow Infrastructure Technology, the initiative used seven productivity key levers as a framework to achieve the vision.
These encompass organisation culture, resident profile, staff capability, workflows, environment, and use of technology.
Putting insights into action
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Process optimisation before automation
The Lentor Residence at Yio Chu Kang was one of the five participating nursing homes. Lentor reviewed their meals delivery process and created a single trip trolley that enabled staff to deliver food and reduce the number of transportation trips to just one. With the improved efficiency, staff can focus more on interacting with residents during mealtimes and pay more attention to residents who require assisted feeding. This has led to an improvement in the well-being of residents.
To further optimise staff time to achieve a new level of productivity, Lentor looked at opportunities to enable the daily meals process with the Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) at their new nursing home sites.
This exemplifies the Process Improvement and Equipment drawn from the Productivity Framework, including automation considerations to raise productivity.
- Coordination and Communication between Nursing and Operations / Kitchen Crew
To augment the single trip trolley, nursing and kitchen staff co-designed new meal order summary cards with colour codes. This serves as a communication tool to enhance coordination of meals order and to improve distribution time. The colour codes are in accordance with the International Dysphagia Diet Standardisation Initiative (IDDSI) under MOH’s EatSafe SG initiative.
Tying back to the Productivity Framework, in this case creative teamwork between the two departments ensured they meet residents’ needs based on Client Profile while Employees build Capability and Capacity to deliver right meals to residents using the visual cues.
- Empowering Residents with changes to the layout
St Andrew’s Nursing Home (SANH) Taman Jurong, another one of the five participating nursing homes, initiated a pilot project involving the setting up of small pantry areas near the residents’ living areas. This enables residents who are mobile to have easy access to prepare their own snacks and drinks, without having to follow a fixed schedule.
This change promotes greater independence for the residents, illustrating the Productivity Framework via active Client Engagement and a small modification to the Environment.
- Organisational Ethos, a strong foundation to drive excellence.
From these examples we can see that a strong organisation that fosters open communication and encourages creativity can spark more opportunities for innovation and productivity. This ties back to the Ethos of an organisation from the Productivity Framework, which is driven by leadership and communicated and reinforced through various improvement opportunities to shape employee behaviours towards Resident Centered Care.
Clarion Call for Action
From these Nursing Homes pilot sites, we developed an e-Book entitled Productivity Insights incorporating their good practices and the Productivity Framework. This e-Book serves as a guide for our nursing home partners in their journey to review and transform their quality of care to yield better productivity and time savings, as well as to empower seniors and staff.
In June 2022, to better drive digitalisation efforts in Community Care sector, AIC launched the Community Care Digitalisation Transformation Plan (CCDTP). As part of the CCDTP, AIC also offers a Productivity and Digitalisation Grant. CCOs can apply for the fund for the adoption of technology in their drive for productivity and digitalisation efforts. CCOs can also make use of the consultancy services offered under CCDTP for the development of Digitalisation Strategies in their transformation journey.
These are two of the steps that we have taken to steer the residential care sector towards improving productivity and delivering better outcomes.
We will need the collective effort of many different organisations to move forward, and we welcome CCOs to work with us towards our shared goal of empowering seniors to live well and age gracefully in the community. Let’s chart a new way forward together.
This article is written by Heidi Rafman, Clarice Woon, Ai Ling Ong from AIC’s Quality Division.
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