Let’s start with a question:
Do you think your care staff understand the best way to write clear and detailed progress notes for their clients?
Do you trust that they’re getting their progress notes right? Or are you concerned by the lack of detail or structure you’ve seen in their notes recently?
As an NDIS or aged care provider, you know that daily progress notes are an essential part of disability support and care delivery.
They’re designed to ensure that all stakeholders in a client’s care – whether it’s support workers, family members, or another provider – are fully aware of what’s going on and where they are on their care journey.
Progress notes in disability support are also an important part of your compliance requirements, meaning it’s critical to ensure that they’re up to date and filled out properly, especially when it comes time for an audit.
That’s why today, we’re going to outline the best practices and solutions you and your team can implement when writing daily progress notes – not only to continue meeting NDIS or aged care compliance requirements, but also to help improve care continuity for your clients as well.
Best practices: What makes a great progress note?
In a nutshell, a great progress note is well-written, well-structured, highly detailed and easy to access when required. Let’s break this down:
Well-written
Put simply, progress notes in aged care or disability support should be clear and easy for the next person reading to understand.
This means using complete terms over shorthand, making sure it’s easily skimmable, and keeping in mind that not everyone reading the note will have clinical or medical knowledge, so it’s best to use simple language.
Well-structured
There’s a huge difference in readability between a progress note that’s well-structured and one that’s presented as a single giant blob of text.
Using a standardised NDIS progress notes template that’s designed to be easy to read and present the information in a pre-defined order will help to make your notes much more readable.
Highly detailed
As you know, several key details should be included as part of your progress notes in aged care or disability support – such as the care tasks performed, any changes in participant wellbeing, medication given, and so on.
Once again, using an NDIS progress notes template will help to prompt your care staff to include all the right information and details each time.
Easy to access
Finally, great progress notes need to be easy to access for all stakeholders.
If you’re storing progress notes in a Word doc, Excel spreadsheet or on paper, this can make it difficult to share or access these notes – not to mention the added risk of losing them forever.
What you need is a streamlined progress note software that makes saving and accessing notes super simple for you.
Essentially, it’s just about building better habits to help take your NDIS progress notes from okay to outstanding.
What are the benefits of writing great progress notes?
When your care staff are writing their progress notes with these best practices in mind, this leads to several key benefits for you as an NDIS or aged care provider, including:
Better compliance
You already know how important progress notes in disability support are for meeting your compliance requirements come audit time.
These best practices dramatically reduce the chances of poor notes slipping through the cracks – notes that could potentially jeopardise your business’s reputation and ability to continue supporting your clients.
Better care continuity
Great progress notes help to drastically improve the level of care and continuity that you can provide to each participant.
When your staff have all the information they need and they know exactly what care has already been provided, it makes it infinitely easier to lay out the next steps in line with the client’s needs, as well as gauge exactly how far they’ve come throughout their care journey.
Better communication with all stakeholders
Family members love to be kept up to date with the progress of their loved ones, and detailed nursing progress notes make it easy to communicate this progress without adding an additional step or process to your care workers’ busy schedule.
Likewise, other providers can also use these progress notes to determine the type of care they need to provide, in line with what has already been delivered by your team.
So, how can you start to improve the quality of your team’s nursing progress notes without increasing their workload or your admin burden?
ShiftCare can help you standardise and simplify progress notes for you and your team
Our ShiftCare app has been specifically designed to make it easy to record, track and share client progress notes in aged care or disability support to help keep everyone in the know.
With features like speak-to-text and our mobile app, your staff can easily create notes on the go. Customisable NDIS progress notes templates also make it simple to create structured notes that capture all the right information and track what really matters.
Sharing nursing progress notes is also a breeze with ShiftCare, making it easy for teams to collaborate and families to stay updated on the progress of loved ones.
Of course, privacy and confidentiality are also of top priority, meaning you can control who can view client progress notes and only share them with certain authorised people.
So, what are you waiting for?
Take advantage of purpose-built progress note software like ShiftCare today to help streamline your progress notes in disability support and ensure they continue to improve both your compliance and care continuity for the benefit of your clients.
Discover the power of ShiftCare in creating and sharing more effective progress notes today
ShiftCare is an easy-to-use care management platform designed to streamline day-to-day operations and reduce administration burdens for NDIS providers, as well as Aged Care and Disability Support services.
Boasting powerful and intuitive features, ShiftCare offers key solutions to improving care management, rostering, HR, invoicing, NDIS compliance and so much more, enabling you and your team to focus on delivering a higher standard of personalised client care.
So, if you’re looking for the best progress note software to help make your notes more effective and streamlined, ShiftCare has got you covered.
Book a demo or get in touch with our team today to discover how ShiftCare can revolutionise your care management and give you back more time for what truly matters.
