Introducing the ExSitu newsletter
Join us as we shine a light on the Australian care scene and patient advocacy, person-centred care, innovation and more.
A few years ago, two nurses were making patient advocacy their everyday workday. Both were in aged care. One was helping people stay longer and stronger in their homes as a carer. The other was bustling around the halls of an aged care facility managing care and a team of nurses who provided it.
Both were known for making the patient heard. And both were doing a heck of a lot with very little. Like most aged care workers or nurses, they were natural masters of innovation.
They just kind of didn’t know that yet.
A distant rumble began quietly on the horizon. It was Australia’s growing interest from tech in healthcare. It was accompanied with an ever-deepening beat of the footfalls and pressing needs of Australian Baby Boomers as they aged up and into the support systems.
When they heard about a chance to build something that put patient values as the centre of aged care, their ears pricked. They decided to meet up, talk shop, and see what would come of it in an innovation challenge environment.
Here, frontline nursing experience and the theory and practice of values-based care found an oddly intuitive home with card sorting processes and cloud-based interfaces. What previously seemed like complex conversations about individualised care needs and often neglected articulation of end-of-life wishes, wants, needs and desires became easy to reach. And even easier to capture.
The art of building a hierarchy of values to build a software became the framework for helping real people identify their own hierarchy of needs when setting goals or in care. The user stories needed to inform features in an MVP lent themselves seamlessly to the contingency plans needed to help people weather a loss of capacity or a major change in life.
And this is how ExSitu was born.
Living, breathing individualised, values-based care
My name is Rebecca Glover and I am that care worker. I sometimes hide the title of nurse under a bushel, even though my co-founder April Creed says I shouldn’t. And I sometimes wonder how I ended up in iAccelerate running a start-up that offers values-based care and advance care planning documents to the aged care, disability and hospital care sector. Even though I feel right at home.
But I never ever forget that it was patient advocacy and giving real people access to real choices that led me here.
On one of my final days as a care worker, a client I had been working with for some time asked me to sit down. She knew I was leaving.
Like most care relationships, we’d forged a bond of trust, respect and yes, even friendship. This departure was particularly painful. And it was making me nervous about my decision to leave.
Sitting across the table from each other, she grabbed my hand. I can still feel the pressure of that touch and the look of kind determination on her face.
“Go out there and change things,” she beseeched me, “I know you can.”
This was not a person who was facing elder abuse. She hadn’t fallen through the cracks. But she was a clever person who knew her own mind.
She was like most us, really. She’d done interesting things, met wonderful people, and given a lot of love to the people around her.
And she wanted me to remind everyone that age is another stage in a rich, full and giving life. That life is not over when you start to grey or enter into aged care. And that our values determine so much of what we define as a good life.
It’s an important reminder for us all.
We don’t cease to exist simply because we’ve aged. Our individuality doesn’t shrivel up and abandon us. Requiring care doesn’t mean we suddenly forget who we are. What we like and dislike – or what we define as too much or too little – doesn’t suddenly become irrelevant because we need a little help.
Those of us who work in aged care know this better than anyone. But it really should be something everyone knows.
Every hard day I have as a start-up founder (and believe me, there are some doozies!), I remember that conversation. I remember the feel of thin fingers, warm against my own hand.
And I remember the glinting eyes of a woman imploring me to not forget her. To not forget anyone like her.
And to give us all what we truly want. The chance to be heard.
But more than that, the chance to live our lives as we have always done. On our own terms.
Where innovation meets care
I am proud that ExSitu is helping large scale aged care organisation move towards compliance with the Aged Care recommendations. By supplying ways to capture the individual client input to create meaningful values-based care plans, we’re directly helping transform aged care and palliative care experiences.
The percentage of people who die with their end-of-life wishes properly recorded is a shockingly low 17 per cent in this country. That means deeply personal choices that potentially lead to people dying with less dignity. This in turn means families watching this occur often feeling powerless to the pain before them. So, providing the opportunity to reduce family trauma through properly articulating what a patient wants before they lose the chance to speak for themselves via advance care planning reminds me why I got into healthcare in the first place.
I am equally proud that our desire to capture the granular parts of a person in a hospital environment to aid in better decision making and more tailored care provision is gaining recognition. And that the application of these deeply personal maps to care plans for Covid patients has propelled us into the spot of a regional winner of the NSW Government Innovation Quest. That we’re providing a healthcare model that can be used with all kinds of hospitalised patients is something I find humbling, exciting and daunting at the same time.
Why am I telling you this?
One thing we’ve noticed with ExSitu is that it’s not that there aren’t people solving issues in healthcare or innovating to improve care generally.
It’s that we often don’t know about it. Not until we meet a fellow start-up or spend time with our peers at a conference. And even then, in aged care, healthcare and end-of-life care, we tend to speak more to people who already know the stories. It’s a little siloed.
So, with the help of our marketing manager (a disability, mental health and end-of-life advocate in her own right), we’ve decided to open up about ExSitu more. The long nodding conversations we have about the good our peers do or the problems we have to overcome are going to find themselves explored. And we want to invite you to share with us what you think we should be writing about.
It’s going to be a cross between LinkedIn (via my profile- lucky me!) and also on a dedicated newsletter on Substack.
This, together with our blog and our social media on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn will be geared towards making care as a subject as visible as possible.
I look forward to hearing your stories and sharing the discussion online!
About ExSitu:
ExSitu helps you define and document what really matters to you so that your loved ones and health care providers can help you live life both now and in the future on your own terms. ExSitu works with individuals through to large-scale care organisations to provide individualised, custom aged care experiences through documenting the values of everyday Australians. This information helps inform day-to-day care, goalsetting, healthcare provision and even end-of-life decision-making in an easy to access, client-friendly cloud-based format.
To find out more, head to
https://myexsitu.com/