Managing visitors, staff, and contractors in aged care facilities may be a challenge. It can be difficult to find a healthy balance between transparency from visitors and privacy, alongside protecting your residents and facility without compromising on visitation and socialization. Fortunately, by implementing a digital visitor management system like Sine can help assist in aiding the protection of your residents and help keep your facility safe. Our powerful digital solutions can also help enhance compliance measures from everyone on your site, helping to ensure your facility is adherent to constantly changing health protocols and regulations.
In this blog post, we have listed some of the many techniques that may help aged care facilities effectively and safely manage visitors and follow workplace policies.
A visitor policy is an essential tool for any aged care facility. It is often used as guidance for staff, visitors, and contractors outlining the rules and expectations that apply if they wish to enter your facility. It is important that your visitor policies are relevant to your facility and workplace requirements, whilst also considering what consequences visitors may face if they violate the policy. Consider the following:
Not only is identifying what visitor policies are needed in your facilities to enhance safety and compliance, but recognizing who is responsible to enforce such policies is also important. This can help achieve a successful visitor policy and ensure all visitors are explicitly made aware of what is required from them alongside what is required from staff. Instead of having a sign at the front of your reception desk, having staff throughout your facility with assigned responsibilities can help ensure your visitor policies and protocols are being followed consistently throughout your site.
No matter what role your staff has to play, everyone can help keep your facility healthy and compliant, all while portraying to your visitors the high standard of safety expectations throughout your site. For instance, you may assign certain staff to have the responsibility of gently reminding visitors to wear a mask throughout compromising areas or to ensure visitors are not 'overstaying' their visit.
A paper-based visitor logbook can mean that anyone walking by can see it and possibly misuse it, leading to potential data breaches. At a minimum, your visitor's name and contact details are on display for the next visitor to see when they are filling out their details, which again, can come under violation of data. Even more so, it can leave a negative overall impression of the facility, as we shift into a more environmentally conscious world.
A digital visitor management solution can also help take some much-needed administration burden off your reception staff as well as help your facility manage visitors more effectively and safely. Ditching the paper and pen visitor book for a digital solution can make it significantly easier to be able to track who comes/who is coming into your facility, the purpose of their visit and who they are here to see. This can also help enhance visibility over your facility, helping to spot anyone who may not be compliant with your visitor policies, such as someone being on-site longer than approved visiting times.
Take your office visitor policies to the next level by recognizing exactly what is needed from visitors before they visit your facility. It is important to remember that no two people entering your facility are the same. Some may be visiting a relative, some may be volunteering or arriving for work, and some may even be externally sourced contractors to perform works on site.
Therefore, to maintain a safe facility, identify what is needed from every visitor type. This can help personalize the check-in process and enhance compliance across your facility. For example, you may require staff or volunteers to wear a mask, meanwhile, you may require externally sourced contractors to be fully inducted before entering your facility. Each visitor, staff member, and contractor have a key role to play in creating and maintaining a healthy and safe facility, which can be achieved by simply communicating what is expected and required from them.
Making a positive first impression on visitors is an important element in creating a seamless and smooth visitor flow. Not only does it help prevent annoying queues in the reception area, but it also demonstrates to your visitors that you run a professional and modern workplace. It is important that as soon as visitors step into your facility, or even beforehand, they feel valued and taken care of, no matter the purpose of their visit. Ensure you incorporate a powerful visitor management system that can help enhance customer satisfaction all while eliminating manual entry and exit processes.
It is important that this software is easy to use, modern, and incorporates your company branding to assist in building future brand recognition and association. If utilized correctly, this can help create seamless visitor flows throughout your aged care facility, without ever compromising on security or convenience.
It is important to implement techniques within your visitor management processes that simplifies and automates the check-in and out process for everyone in . Think about this, if you are visiting a relative frequently, it may be a bit of a hassle to write your contact details on a visitor logbook every time. This can also pose a data risk, whereby visitor contact details may be visible to anyone passing by. This can be relevant for everyone entering your site, whether it be a visitor, staff member, volunteer, or contractor. Therefore, it is useful to put a system in place that can enable people to seamlessly enter and exit your facility, helping them to get straight to where they need to be.
A digital visitor management solution like Sine can help achieve this and offer a solution that enables smooth visitor flows. From scanning their Fast Track QR code on the SinePoint Pro iPad app, automatic check-in for returning visitors using geofencing technology through to facial recognition check-in capabilities, Sine comes with robust features to help effectively manage visitors in your aged care facility.
It may be the case that you have a range of different visitors entering your facility every day, for a diverse range of reasons. However, they all have one thing in common, they are present in your facility and want to be kept in the know about any incidents or events that can affect them. It is also important to use effective communication channels to demonstrate to visitors, staff, and contractors what is expected from them and what actions they may need to take in certain situations. If you are still using a paper-based visitor logbook, it may be difficult to ensure everyone is receiving the right information at the right time.
A digital visitor management solution like Sine can be an effective solution for not only managing visitors in an aged care facility, but also allowing for clear and real-time communication with everyone on site. With Sine, there are a variety of different ways your recipient can receive your message. This can include email, SMS, through the SinePro mobile app, or even displaying messages on your iPad kiosk.
When looking to implement a digital solution to effectively manage visitors in an aged care facility, it is important to ensure that it comes with the right features that are flexible with your workplace and with constantly changing health protocols. Sine offers a whole host of features to help enable seamless visitor flows whilst helping to enhance safety and compliance:
Aurrum Aged Care wanted a way to quickly and seamlessly adapt to ever-changing Covid-19 regulations and requirements. With a continuously growing pile of paperwork and new changing laws around vaccination requirements in a nursing home, a manual check-in system was no longer practical. A big standout for the facility using Sine was the ability to collect flu vaccination certificates quickly and efficiently from visitors. Moreover, they appreciated the ability to approve or rejecting every access request.
"Sine is fantastic! It has automated the process of collecting and validating flu vaccine certificates, has greatly improved our visitor management and reporting, and removed the need for our old paper-based check-in system."
Read Aurrum Aged Care's case study
Interested to see how Sine can help your aged care facility? Book a demo with our team today!
