Our new iCare training app, developed in conjunction with Agylia, UCLPartners & NELFT, has been designed for carers to help them spot signs of deterioration in the health of those they care for and intervene quickly. This scalable and accessible education and training platform has been designed following research that showed a need for education and skills training to be more accessible to carers. Benefits of this new tool are expected to be:

• Increased confidence and knowledge and carers,
• Reduction in the number of health crises and exacerbations of long-term conditions among those they are caring for.
• Reduced associated healthcare consumption, for example, urgent admissions to hospital.

The Care City team have been working hard recruiting carers to test the new app. Here our project team member Alexa Kerr-Dineen talks about her experience and insights working on the project…

Unpaid carers truly are the unsung heroes of our society. Recent figures published by Carers UK have shown that providing unpaid care saves the economy a staggering £132 billion each year. Yet, sadly it is all too commonplace that unpaid carers feel under supported, over stretched and overlooked. This should not be the case.

I joined Care City in October 2019 as part of the Skills for Care Graduate Management programme – I am lucky enough to be hosted by Care City until October 2020. It became obvious to me after a very short time that iCare was a project that resonated strongly with my moral beliefs and was something I could really see myself getting stuck in with. Fortunately for me, the team at Care City wants to see you thrive and offers a great deal of support in pursuing your passions and interests, and so I was welcomed onto the iCare team with open arms.

Since taking the reins of iCare, my eyes have been opened to the sheer empathy, patience and humanity that carers possess. Stepping into the role of carer for a loved one means taking on additional physical, emotional, and often financial burdens. Meeting carers with an aim to alleviate even a portion of that stress through the iCare app has been a truly powerful experience, and reminded me of the reason why we do all we do at Care City: to help people. The carers that we encountered shoulder the burden of caring for a loved one with diligence, humility and a saintly patience, and reinstated my faith in humanity in times of ever increasing uncertainty.

The predominant aim of the iCare app is to educate unpaid carers, that’s to say those who care for their friends, neighbours, or loved ones outside the professional capacity, in the prevention and management of pressure ulcers, more commonly known as bedsores. We have endeavoured to contribute a useful resource to aid the much needed training and support for unpaid carers and empower them and bolster their confidence to care for their loved ones.

Despite our best intentions, finding carers to try out the app was not entirely smooth sailing. It is safe to say that we encountered some resistance to the digital revolution and a great deal of underconfidence in using new technologies. Some are fortunate enough to have tech-savvy grandchildren and have been coached in the likes of Facetime, internet banking and Amazon… others call it an iPatch. One of our participants in the trial, let’s call him Pete, fell into the latter category. He had never downloaded an app before and had to dig around for quite some time to unearth his username and password. By the time we’d got through the labyrinthine app store and installed the app, Pete was beginning to question how helpful this app would actually be to him. However, his trepidation did not last long. It seemed to me as though his reluctance came from a place of uncertainty; launching into the unknown technological world can be daunting. We took the time to explain the app to Pete and emphasised that this was a mutual learning experience; his input would help us help him. This seemed to bolster Pete’s confidence and he was soon deftly moving through the app. Despite being the most hesitant as to how the app would help him and being rather quick to criticise, Pete has since turned out to be the user with the most engagement, and has got to know the app thoroughly, completing every module and providing thorough and constructive feedback. Pete is a fantastic example of the many technological converts we have encountered throughout this process, and reinstated my confidence that it’s never too late to learn something new.

The brilliant thing about iCare is its potential to adapt. While pressure ulcers were a recurring theme in our initial interviews with carers, there are many other challenges that the 5.4 million (figure provided by NHS UK) unpaid carers face. Developing iCare as a vessel of information means that we may be able to adapt the content to cover many other areas, such as challenging behaviours. The nature of the lives of unpaid carers dictates that they have very limited spare time and flexibility, so providing an app that is accessible 24/7 at the carer’s fingertips looks to combat the time and energy constraints that unpaid carers face. Pete mostly looked at the iCare app late in the evening, perhaps after his wife was in bed and he found himself with a spare 5 minutes. Other carers found that they could browse the app on the bus, over breakfast or whilst grabbing a quick coffee. Once the pressure ulcer module pilot is complete, the next steps would be to look into developing iCare further into being a reliable, accessible and easy to use information hub for many different areas of care.

Being on the ground and interacting with carers during the iCare process has highlighted the meaning behind ‘community interest company’ as exactly that, we are inspired by the community that we serve to do the work that we do and seeing the changes, however small, that we make to people’s lives provides the all important perspective that is all too often lost during challenging times in a system under pressure.