An App to Improve Caregiver's Lives
What is Shift Check?
The Technology Assisted Children’s Home Prog (TACHP) serves and supports families with technology-assisted children through advocacy, education, coaching and referrals to support the provision of in-home care. The program has a vast reach as they serve 31 counties in the state of Pennsylvania. TACHP needed a way to efficiently collect feedback from caregivers on the in-home care provided by pediatric nurses and decided on a mobile app solution from MilkCrate.
The goals for Shift Check are multifold:
Caregivers are able to track data that is relevant to their daily lives and experiences with home nursing staff, reducing their mental load, streamlining tasks, enabling them to refer to logged information efficiently and for more effective self-advocacy.
Caregiver experiences, family and life impacts are validated when caregivers document the totality of their experiences, connect with other caregivers and view videos and stories of other caregivers navigating the same challenges.
Caregivers are able to locate relevant resources, connect with other caregivers, and connect with TACHP, enhancing their support systems and reducing their isolation.
Caregivers have the chance to learn about and join advocacy efforts aimed at decision-makers working to resolve the statewide home shift nursing crisis.
Relevant data can be aggregated by TACHP enabling better understanding of trends and patterns in home shift nursing care delivery and experience across Pennsylvania, and to support our advocacy efforts on behalf of families.
While the first iteration of the app has been focused on families with medically complex children in Pennsylvania, the vision is that the app will be useful for families with loved ones of all ages receiving care from home shift staff in Pennsylvania and beyond. There are also plans to expand functions in future iterations to include accessibility features, med management, staff scheduling, personal data reporting, and all of this in more languages. With the inclusion of more features and functions, greater access to people who speak more languages, and whose loved ones receiving care encompass all phases of life, the app has the potential to support many families. The app also has the potential to generate large amounts of aggregated data to better pinpoint where – and for whom - home shift staffing challenges are occurring around the country.
How and who does this app help?
The home shift nursing crisis has generated many impacts on nurses and on families with medically complex children. Families are experiencing delayed discharges, inconsistent shift coverage, and poor service. Nurses may be late for a shift, cancel their previously scheduled shift, may be inadequately trained, or fall asleep on the job. Discharge from hospitals to home can last weeks to months when appropriate home nursing care is unavailable, leaving children and their parents stuck in the hospital, their lives suspended.
Thus far, there has been no efficient way to collect standardized data from the caregiver perspective across Pennsylvania. There also has been no efficient way to interpret standardized data sets to better understand service inequities, service failures and successes, or secondary impacts upon families when nurses are unavailable. Inequities or inconsistencies in home shift nursing service quality and delivery over time, across regions, or among cultural, language or ethnic groups, are not easily understood or visible to advocates, decision makers, or industry professionals. Families are too overburdened by the totality of their responsibilities to expend time and energy advocating for themselves and end up simply coping with monumental challenges including illness, job loss, chronic sleep deprivation, financial impacts, and family disruption.
Additionally, the home shift nursing workforce needs higher pay, better benefits and higher quality training. Better “job pipelines,” incentives to work in underserved areas (or with underserved populations) and more support would help ameliorate the current pediatric home health shift coverage crisis.
In collaboration with app developer MilkCrate, the Technology Assisted Children’s Home Program has developed the first iteration of a free mobile software application (“app”), called Shift Check, creating a singular platform to help address the home shift nursing crisis from the caregiver perspective.
Shift Check was created to support caregivers in documenting their experiences, and to easily access a log of their own data inputs and details related to delayed discharges, disrupted nursing shifts, completed shifts, or changes in staffing needs. Since many families work with multiple staffing agencies, chronically over time, Shift Check also offers a way for caregivers to keep track of the staff that have come to their home. Caregivers can upload images, or self-refer to the Technology Assisted Children’s Home Program. Since caregivers are often isolated, Shift Check also offers a way for caregivers to track their own moods and impacts on daily life related to their nursing care experience. TACHP is targeting the pediatric home shift nursing crisis and the families impacted by that crisis because those are the families the program is working to support. But the app can also be used by caregivers anywhere who are working with in-home staffing support – nurses or other medical support staff that come to the home from an agency. And moreover, the app can be used for patients who are in any age group – not just the pediatric patient population. While the app is primarily used in Pennsylvania; it’s use can be effective anywhere. There will be more beta testing done and any feedback is welcomed!