How single-handed care came into the UK
Health care systems around the world are under pressure. In the UK, single-handed care initiatives look at whether all or part of a homecare package can be safely reduced to a single worker.
The benefits of single-handed care for patients include improved dignity, enhanced well-being, and social connection.
Single-handed care is well established in the UK, thanks to the work of A1 Risk Solutions, who have brought this approach into more than 100 organisations and local authorities. They have adopted it as a way of reducing dependency on double-handed packages.
The reported success across the acute NHS organisations that have taken it up runs somewhere between 40 and 80 per cent of packages reduced. The principle isn’t in doubt. What’s harder to work out is which transfers can be safely done by one person.
Deborah Harrison, who founded A1 Risk Solutions and sits on the ISO committee for hoist and sling standards, has spent a long time on that problem. The research around A1’s system (Webb et al, 2022) measures competence and confidence rather than equipment. That matches what we hear from the OTs we work with. Even if the technology is available, the harder part is being confident enough in one particular transfer, for one particular person, to put your name to a reduced package.
Sit-to-sit, not sit-to-stand
The Kera hoist was designed exactly for this gap.
The Kera moves someone between two seated positions. Bed to chair, chair to commode, chair to car seat. The person doesn’t stand at any point and doesn’t need to bear weight through their legs or hold on. One caregiver operates it.
That puts the Kera in a gap a lot of people fall into.
A sit-to-stand aid needs the person to take some of their own weight and hold on, so it stops working as strength goes.
A full ceiling hoist works, but it’s an installation, and for plenty of households it feels like a much bigger step than where they actually are.
Between those two there’s a stretch of time, sometimes years, where neither answer fits. The Kera is built for that stretch.
What one carer actually needs
Two things tend to decide whether a transfer is a one-person job. Whether the carer has to take any of the person’s weight, and whether the person has to do something reliably at the right moment.
With the Kera, the person is securely held and lifted. The carer isn’t lifting and isn’t bracing, and there’s no point in the transfer that depends on the person holding on or moving at the right time. Alex O’Keefe, who designs the Kera, describes the movement as being like a piggy-back or a hug, which gets closer than the technical language does.
One of our customers, Noeline, explains:
“We do multiple transfers in the course of the day and I can’t imagine using anything else really. It’s a one person item, it doesn’t need extra people to transfer someone safely from say the bed to a commode.”
It goes where the person goes
The Kera isn’t fixed to one transfer point the way an installed hoist is. It moves between rooms, and it comes out of the house.
The Kera Travel packs down and goes with you, which is life changing for people who want their week to include something other than the house.
Try it for yourself
If you’ve got someone whose double-handed package is under review and you’d like to see the transfer for yourself, get in touch with Newlyn Healthcare, our UK distributor, for a demo.
