Mobile phones for carers in the provision of home care and care homes are an essential tool, with a strong focus on reliability of service.
Care home workers are on their feet all day, and therefore require reliable business mobiles to complete urgent tasks, without having to rely on time-consuming paperwork.
UC tools enable care home workers to enter crucial data onto tablets or phones, all whilst continuing their resident care.
Unified Communications (UC) in Care Homes
Care homes in the healthcare sector have a duty of care to provide a service which is flexible and agile. Unified Communications helps you do that by bringing together different technologies to run in sync so that your care home can run effectively, productively and efficiently.
Unified Communications has been proven to benefit most businesses, but it can transform healthcare organisations by giving their patients enhanced quality of care and improve collaboration between colleagues (medical and support staff.)
Many areas are embracing technological advances in order to reshape how care is delivered, how information is exchanged and how conditions are monitored. The majority of us use advanced technical devices as part of our daily lives, and there is a need to ensure that these types of digital capability are being used to their full potential to support provision of home care.
UC technology can be used successfully to enhance the delivery of care to support independent living, enhance the health and well-being information exchange between patients and professionals, and to enhance the information exchange between professionals.
Unified Communications tools are the key to collaboration within care homes, and when it all works as intended, provides a seamless link between carers and staff in care home settings.
Key Features for Business Mobiles in Care Homes
There are obviously some distinct considerations when choosing business mobiles for your care home staff. One of them is integration with UC tools, and any existing infrastructure within your care home, and the others include speed dial features such as emergency buttons that are reached in the quickest way possible.
Wi-Fi
A consideration for mobiles in care homes is the stability of the Wi-Fi on the premises. Is Wi-Fi accessible in the rooms at the care home?
Wi-Fi is extremely beneficial when your carers are visiting care homes and need to connect their laptop, tablet, or mobile to use a strong, secure signal. Wi-Fi calling is a fairly new mobile phone feature which allows you to make phone calls, send texts over Wi-Fi rather than the more traditional route; using your mobile network which uses the masts.
It is to improve connectivity and coverage because rural areas tend to have patchy reception.
Wi-Fi calling will need to be enabled on your mobile phone device and then it will be able to link in with any connected wi-fi network. Once enabled, most networks allow you to move between wi-fi calling or via their network automatically.
Data Pooling
Data Pooling or Pooled Data (when in relation to mobiles) is where you can have an amount of data available and you can choose to share it between different care home staff who have different devices. For example, you can have a data pool plan for X amount of data shared between a whole business, each who have a mobile device.
This means that individuals use the data needed and the business is not penalised when they go over their data limit as there will always be someone who uses less. It means that light and heavy data users balance it out and helps eliminate extra charges.
Other considerations
Depending on your setting, your care home may require a phone system which is able to manage multiple phone systems.
You may require specific voicemail features, such as transcribing calls into text in order to forward as emails.