7 Trends to Shape Your Investment Strategy for Modernisation in Residential Care
Today’s prospective residents and their family decision-makers are increasingly selective when evaluating retirement communities and care homes.
With easy online access to comparisons, virtual tours, and reviews, they expect upscale living with modern designs, amenities, technologies and programming to support their continued active and engaged lifestyles. This presents a problem for residential care providers that are not prioritising strategic investments into the modernisation of their residential care facilities.
To remain competitive in this consumer-driven landscape, leading providers are shaping strategic plans around targeted investments to thoughtfully modernise their offerings, based on current and anticipated trends in the wants and needs of modern residents.
7 Trends That Should Shape Your Strategic Investment Strategy
Demographic Changes
The Baby Boomer generation is now ageing into senior living, bringing new expectations that require strategic investments into modernisation. Having grown up in a time of prosperity and progress, Boomers lead more active lifestyles and are used to customised consumer experiences, quality dining, amenities-rich communities, and accessible, tech-enabled homes.
Boomers expect easy communication with family from home. Providers must enable seamless communication between residents, staff and family through investments in smart care technology to make their transition from their home to yours as personal, seamless and as undisruptive as possible.
Prospects Are Doing More Online Research
With easy online access to comparisons, differentiation through modernisation should be at the forefront of any visionary residential provider's mind. Modernisation can be leveraged as a powerful marketing tool in the comparison of your residential facility to others, in attracting modern consumers.
Providers should also make strategic investments in digital platforms to showcase modernisations externally, such as user-friendly websites with 360 virtual tours, engaging social media, and proactive online reputation management. Marketing the improvements is equally important.
High Employee Turnover and “The Great Resignation”
Employee turnover is problematic across industries but especially challenging in senior living. Across the sector in the UK alone, there were a reported 152,000 vacancies in 2022/23. Constant hiring and onboarding drains time and money, and a lack of adequate staffing puts huge pressure on your existing staff and their ability to care for your residents.
By strategically investing in modern technologies that optimise operations and reduce staffing burdens, providers can modernise in a sustainable way without over-reliance on hiring. Streamlined solutions enable facilities to adapt with less disruption to existing staff resources, and the new ways of working allowed through investments into technology assist homes in retaining and attracting staff, due to a significant reduction in staff burdens and stress.
Personalised Care and Customised Care Plans
Residents and resident families value personalised care that caters to their unique needs and preferences more than ever. Prospective residents are evaluating communities based on how well they can deliver customised care.
Providers should make strategic investments into resources and tools that allow care to be customised and tailored specifically for individual residents.
Home-like Design and Development
Residents expect a welcoming, home-like environment when paying premium prices. Prospects will evaluate aesthetics, layouts and amenities for residential comfort.
Loud alarms, pull-cords and bulky care tech don’t fit the aesthetic of a home-like residential space. Providers should look to prioritise investment into modern, unobtrusive and discreet care technology to match beautiful interiors, and provide residents with the comfort of their own home, while ensuring high-levels of independent care as much as possible.
Focus on Quality of Life, Wellness and Active Ageing
Holistic wellness through both infrastructure and programming are becoming more and more expected by prospective residents. Providers that strategically invest into modernising active-ageing resources will attract consumers seeking engaged and independent lifestyles.
This includes management structures that allow independent, active lifestyles, which can be enabled by strategic investment into real-time well-being and location intelligence through unobtrusive, discreet wearables and sensors like Tagscout Care.
Digital Tools and Technology for Operations Management
Resident care systems are shifting from paper-based and siloed multi-platform management to streamlined and centralised management platforms like Tagscout Care.
Residential care providers are recognising the many benefits care technology can provide beyond daily management optimisation, including real-time operational visibility, long-term staffing and cost reductions, and most importantly, dramatically enhanced resident experiences. Strategic care technology investments are enabling facilities to modernise on multiple fronts.
This modernisation is providing residential care providers with sustainability and a vision of a prosperous future, in a sector that many are fearful of having to close if their internal operations are unable to change.
Modernise Without Disruption: Invest in Tagscout Care
We provide a range of battery-powered, WiFi-independent discreet and stylish wearables and sensors, connected to a central platform that’s accessible from any device, on-site and remotely.
The system has been built to be as simple to use for staff as it is undisruptive for residents, with seamless set-up within just one day.
It’s difficult to summarise just how many capabilities Tagscout Care provides residential homes and retirement communities with, but the most commonly sought-after features of the technology include centralisation for:
- Accessible nurse call without the need for fixed-place buttors or pull-cords.
- Automatic fall detection with precise location alerts for faster-than-ever response times.
- Access control that can be personalised for residents and staff dependent on their needs, and your requirements.
- Purposeful walking support and real-time location intelligence, on or off-site, for those residents seeking to retain higher levels of autonomy, but with the comfort blanket that help will be there if needed.
- Infection control, which provides insights into both staff and resident health and movement.
Wearables
Our state-of-the-art wearables can be worn as a pendant or wrist watch. When worn as a watch, we have a specially-designed locking band requiring a magnetic key, to reduce the risk of them being removed, for those residents whose location must be known at all times for their safety.
They’re comfortable, discreet, and water-proof, so can be worn in the shower and can be personalised with family photos on LED display screens. They track activity in real-time and enable 2-way audio communication between residents and staff for accessibility. Access control can be personalised to each wearable, which provides keyless entry/exit for all doors to ensure the safety of individual residents, depending on their needs. Voice commands for nurse call, and door control through integration with Amazon Alexa further enhance accessibility.
Sensors
All of our sensors are again battery operated and WiFi-independent, meaning that if there was a grid failure, your system would not be affected.
We have a number of sensors that have the ability to report on the temperature and humidity of different rooms. Access control readers that can be placed near exit points, internally and externally, smart apartment locks that can be installed on most internal doors and pull cords that can be placed wherever is convenient for your residents, on any surface; for example, in the shower.
Platform
The Tagscout Care platform can be accessed from any device, whether you’re at a desktop, tablet or mobile, either through a browser or the Tagscout Care app.
The platform has been built to be very user-friendly and intuitive, while monitoring the activities of your home from any location in real-time. The platform sends alerts to the appropriately configured users for any triggers that it’s been set up for and tells you exactly where the resident in need is, whether on-site or off.
With Tagscout Care, communities gain must-have visibility and automation to improve care without disruptive renovation. Intuitive design empowers both residents and busy staff.
