Mycarematters is a social enterprise with a mission to improve the experience of care in any care setting. We enable the whole person to be taken into account by all those caring for and interacting with them.
Mycarematters was originally created by Zoe Harris in the light of her late husband’s experience with dementia. Our latest online communication tool has evolved from a paper-based version she produced to help share the information she knew Geoff would have talked about, had he been able.
Mycarematters.org is an online platform where information that someone wants care professionals to know about them as a person - including their non medical needs and preferences - can be recorded, quickly retrieved and displayed by their bed. For hospitals that sign up to Mycarematters we also provide blank paper profiles to be completed with people who do not wish, or are unable to go online.
When this type of information is available it helps all staff get to know the people they are caring for, to understand what matters to them, be able to meet their needs, reduce the trauma and anxiety often experienced by patients in hospital, and in doing so build trust.
Mycarematters profiles are especially useful where a person has communication challenges, either as a result of a cognitive impairment such as dementia or a temporary condition such as delirium.
Such an approach has recently been endorsed by NHS Improvement in their Dementia Assessment and Improvement Framework intended to help hospitals achieve ‘outstanding’ care standards for those living with dementia during their stay in hospital.
We are currently working with a number of hospitals to integrate Mycarematters into the everyday life of all wards caring for people who may have communication challenges.
We have built in four important features to ensure the Mycarematters System really does make a difference:
- brevity: staff have very limited time to read ‘non-essential’ information so a Mycarematters profile is printed / written on one single-sided A4
- immediacy: a patient’s profile can be accessed within minutes of them arriving on the ward, or filled in much more quickly than other, longer documents
- transferability: whether moving from one ward to another, to another care setting for rehab, or returning home with a care package a patient’s online Mycarematters profile is always available
- visibility: we ask all hospitals using Mycarematters to display patients’ profiles behind the bed.
Please contact us if you would like to find out more about adopting the Mycarematters system in your Trust / hospital or hospice.
You can find more about patient profiles here