About Millennium Care

Millennium Care’s facility in North Yorkshire is a high-quality, specialised care home for people with learning difficulties and complex needs.

Many residents are prone to exhibiting very challenging behaviour, which can expose staff to assault from (usually unintentional) outbursts of violent activity.

The care home’s mix of residents includes adults throughout the spectrum from older to younger. Their conditions range from autism and learning difficulties through to very complex needs and extremely challenging backgrounds. Millennium Care accommodates 19 residents at any one time and the level of behavioural difficulty demands staffing on a one-to-one basis.

Millennium Care prides itself on providing a highly supportive environment for its residents, including making available a wide range of activities such as a music group, cookery, drama, football, bowling, information technology, rugby, swimming and even first-aid. 

The Challenge

Care home staff need to be able to covertly summon help when they need to de-escalate a situation before it has the chance to become violent.

Staff also need to summon a ‘crash-team’ should a non-emergency situation arise either due to a threat to the staff member or other residents, or indeed if a patient health emergency arises.  For both situations to work reliably, the alarm needs to be raised from a device worn on the person because often the ‘threat’ could physically be in-between the staff member and a wall-mounted call button.

The Solution

Due to the nature of the care home operation, Pinpoint introduced an integrated system whereby staff wear a body-worn PIT (Personal Infrared Transmitter) that summons help immediately, providing round-the-clock support and safety to all front-line staff.

The reason for the PIT system was so at any emergency, staff can call upon support without raising the awareness of the care home residents.  The aim was to ensure that no residents were alarmed by the system to keep peace in any situation.

The new Pinpoint system was installed with no fuss - including with a modification to the requirement part-way through the installation to accommodate a new extension to the building. This is in an environment where residents with challenging behaviour probably generate five incidents per week when members of staff need to use their PIT to summon urgent assistance.

Millennium Care’s Pinpoint system raises the alarm with a combination of audible alarms, graphic displays in strategic locations plus flashing over door lights in the corridor outside the room containing the emergency. All of which combine to ensure the crash-team is guided to the correct room within seconds. This results in less danger to staff, less danger for other residents and far less likelihood of the other residents themselves becoming disturbed.

The Results

The Pinpoint system is only one element in delivering Millennium Care’s mission of supporting these challenged residents. But, by ensuring a safe environment for both staff and residents, it enables everybody to concentrate on the job in hand; namely rehabilitating the residents to be able to live better lives and, for many, to reduce their challenging behaviours to enable them to graduate from needing 24x7 one-on-one care to less costly semi-independent supported living environments.

“We learned the hard way that not every staff attack system is adequate. In 2013 when we opened our facility, we installed a system from a manufacturer I won’t name, but it proved to be absolutely awful. Staff would pull their staff panic alarm but sometimes nothing happened. The consequences were dreadful because, as a result of help not arriving, it would lead to our staff getting assaulted.

“We worked with the manufacturers for nearly three years as they tried and tried to make it work properly. But they just couldn’t do it. When you have a relatively new system installed, it is a difficult decision to make to rip it out and replace it.

“But the safety of our staff and residents is paramount, so we realised we had to bite the bullet and scrap the system. We simply could not continue to have our staff and residents in danger. Our MD had seen Pinpoint in action previously, so we investigated it and found nothing but positive experiences reported by its many users.

“Our staff finally feel perfectly safe as they know that their body-worn personal alarm will summon help immediately every time.

“We wish we’d had Pinpoint from the outset and we are now intending to deploy it at two new homes we are currently planning. I would sum-up Pinpoint systems as effective, safe and reliable. The Pinpoint company is highly supportive, helpful and very knowledgeable of our operational needs.”

Rachel Blackburn, Head of Care Homes for Millennium Care

To find out more about installing a similar care home system, please contact the Pinpoint team.