Elderly care professional Marc Ulbrich tells us about the main challenges of incontinence care in nursing homes and how Orizon Smart helped them.

Some time ago we interviewed Marc Ulbrich, a caregiver with over 20 years of experience in elderly care currently working at the Evangelische Heimstiftung Palmscher Garten care home in Deizisau, Germany. We wanted to understand the current struggles when it comes to incontinence care and see how Orizon Smart could help. This institution was in fact one of the first ones to try the Orizon Smart solution during one of our first pilots, so the staff could work with it and see the impact by themselves.
In this extract of the interview, Marc talks about the main challenges on his daily job and how technologies like Orizon Smart can help alleviate them. Have a look at his own words below:

“In the nursing and care industry at the moment, it’s difficult to find new personnel or even to hang on to your existing staff. Employees are leaving because there’s simply too much work, too many tasks and not enough time. If you could better manage these processes by having tools like Orizon Smart for optimising the workflow and, if consequently, you had more time for people and for the residents, then I think you could hang on to your employees and possibly even recruit new ones.

Orizon Smart has been incredibly helpful and specially effective in reducing leakages. This has a big impact on the residents and on us, the staff. For example, when residents on a wheelchair suffer leakages in their incontinence products and they get wet, I need to transfer them onto a bed, which is a physical strain for me, but also for them, because they need to stand up and they often have pain due to problems in their legs. In fact, a wet pad and wet trousers represent a number of different stresses and strains. For me it’s a physical strain and also time pressure, but for the residents themselves it is also a mental strain. They feel humiliated because of their wet clothes. They often tell me things like “Oh, I’m making such a lot of work for you.” And then I say, “That’s not a problem, that’s what I’m here for, to help you.” But of course, for me it’s not always easy. They also probably feel diminished in their sense of self-worth due to the incontinence, which is also visible. And for me, I feel a physical strain, as I said, due to having to transfer them out of the wheelchair onto a bed and possibly also onto the toilet, and then I have to change their clothes. But also the time factor that’s involved in the changing of the clothes and the incontinence material. So much time is lost that I could actually use for other things that I have to do in my daily care duties but the time simply gets lost.

The Orizon solution by Ontex helps us to know when to act so no leakages happen, and we avoid all the burden that it follows, giving us more time each day and a more comfortable work routine.”