Promoting Digitalization in Nursing Care

Promoting digitalization in long-term care is a hot topic. After all, digitalization has become an integral part of our lives. Whether in business, schools, or long-term care facilities, everyone must adapt to it. To drive digitalization forward in long-term care, long-term care insurance providers are making funding available, as digitalization in this sector holds tremendous potential for streamlining processes and improving care itself.

To advance digitization in the nursing sector, the Nursing Staff Reinforcement Act was enacted. The goal of this law is to provide concrete and sustainable relief for nursing staff in their day-to-day work. This includes, in particular, internal quality management, the collection of quality indicators, collaboration between physicians and inpatient nursing facilities, and initial, continuing, and advanced training in geriatric care.

Significant investments are also planned for staffing. This is intended to create better working conditions and improve the quality of care. Long-term care insurance providers will continue to provide funding for the digitization of long-term care through 2023.

Up to 40% of the costs for digital and technical equipment can be covered per care facility. This also includes training courses. The maximum grant amount is €12,000, which can be allocated to various measures. This funding is available as a one-time grant for each outpatient and inpatient care facility.

Where is there a need for support in the digital transformation of nursing care?

There is a need for support almost everywhere. Digitalization in nursing care encompasses smart technologies designed to provide assistance. Examples include assistive systems such as fall detectors, sensor systems for analyzing movement patterns in the home, and smart mattresses that alert caregivers to changes in the patient’s condition. Software solutions that autonomously combine care planning and documentation are also part of this. A third area involves service robots that handle transport tasks on the wards.

These are all changes that cannot be implemented easily. After all, the staff doesn't know how to handle them.

Challenges in Funding

Change isn't easy. The road to seamless digitalization in healthcare will be a rocky one, fraught with many challenges. What challenges do you anticipate in promoting digitalization?

Integrating Digitalization into Everyday Life

If you’re planning to make your care facility more digital, you need to keep in mind that this won’t happen overnight. The care staff must be prepared for this; otherwise, digitization will take up more of their time than the tasks did before. The question you need to ask yourself is: How can you integrate digitization into the daily routine of your care facility?

Prepare your staff for the system change. Familiarize them with the new processes before the system goes live. With datango, you can easily create training materials to prepare your staff for the system change.

Support for New Colleagues

New staff members are constantly joining the team, and they first need to learn the new processes. Therefore, the employer must develop a strategy to teach these new, digitized workflows. Does your staff have the time to provide round-the-clock support to new colleagues so they can understand the digitization efforts at your facility?

The nursing staff at your facility already has enough on their plate. They can't afford to spend time training new caregivers. With datango, new employees can be trained quickly and efficiently.

Employee Training

You’ve decided to digitize your care facility and have organized a training session for your staff. It’s an in-person training session that can only take place on this one day. It’s not very likely that all staff members will be able to be on site that day. And most importantly, who will take care of the residents during that time? Wouldn’t it be possible to conduct the training from home?

If you’re already in the process of digitizing your care facility with government grants, you should also offer online training. This will give your staff the opportunity to complete the training thoroughly at home, rather than during the hectic pace of work. datango enables you to create online training courses.

Supporting Skilled Workers with a Different Linguistic Background

In recent years, the proportion of nursing staff with a different linguistic background has increased. With the shift to digitalization, you face the challenge of training these staff members to use a new system that is unfamiliar to them. The language barrier poses a major challenge in this regard. Who will conduct the training? Can you afford to relieve a nurse of their daily duties and assign them the task of training others?

datango offers learning content in over 40 languages. This means that onboarding foreign employees is no longer a problem. Your own employees no longer have to conduct the training; they simply need to be available to answer questions.

Retaining and Sharing Knowledge Within the Company

You have a caregiver who is thoroughly familiar with the digital systems and is always available to answer questions. When fully trained employees leave your facility, the knowledge they have accumulated is lost as well. The key question is: How do you retain this caregiver’s knowledge within your facility so that new colleagues can also benefit from it?

We at datango have a solution for this, too. We offer you the ability to create documentation quickly and easily, thereby preserving that knowledge. This allows your staff to benefit from the knowledge of every individual.

The Solution: Nursing Training with datango

Say goodbye to training programs that don’t fit your needs. datango lets you create your own training materials. High-quality training materials are essential for developing your staff to their full potential and helping them adapt to change. Tailor your training programs to your specific needs so your staff can smoothly transition to digitalization. Whether you need detailed manuals or brief guides, datango has the right solution for you.