Recently Marilyn Lawson, Executive Director at Village Valley View Memory Care Center and Jennifer Smith, Senior Manager Communications with Kami Vision, sat down to discuss the memory care community’s experience with their new KamiCare Fall Management solution. You may watch the interview video above, or read the discussion, below.
Jennifer: Thanks for talking with me today, so tell me, what is your impression of KamiCare so far, now that your community has had it in place for the past several months?
Marilyn: I think it’s a great program. I’ve gotten a lot out of it, and I think it’s a great resource for a lot of reasons to help prevent falls, to help come up with interventions for residents to prevent residents from being on the floor for longer than they need to be. It’s been a great experience.
Jennifer: Your staff is really busy caring for residents, what have you enjoyed the most about KamiCare?
Marilyn: So things (with KamiCare) have been really helpful for us here at this community. We have been able to identify the reasons for why residents are falling, because especially in memory care, they’re not able to tell us every time why they’re falling, and so it’s hard for us to come up with interventions to help prevent those for future falls, not only just to help prevent falls, but help prevent injury if they do fall.
The other thing I really like is that it alerts us when a resident falls, so it decreases the amount of time that a resident could potentially be on the floor waiting for assistance if they can’t get to a pull cord or if they don’t know how to call out for help.
Jennifer: Can you share some examples of how KamiCare has helped your staff in how they care for residents?
Marilyn: We had a resident who was found on the floor and they weren’t able to tell us why they were on the floor. And so we found through the video that they actually slid out of their bed, which alerted us that their bed was too high, so we were able to make adjustments to the bed to prevent future falls. We had another incident where a resident tripped over something that we didn’t know would be a potential fall hazard, so we were able to remove that. So that didn’t happen again.
We had a resident who left their walker across the room and we found through the video that is what had happened, and so we were able to put interventions in place for the staff to assure that it was by their bed in case they needed to get up. We found residents who hadn’t fallen that actually just sat on the floor and we didn’t know that was their behavior. It’s really interesting when you’re able to actually see the reasons and why, and it just really helps to come up with interventions so that it doesn’t continue to happen. Otherwise, we’re basically just putting things in place and we have no idea if they’re helpful or not.
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More insights on KamiCare from Marilyn Lawson