Documenting key personal details for your Clients in Birdie allows you to build a person-centred representation of them which can be easily shared and accessed by your care staff at the click of a button.

This will be the first step after creating a Client's profile. If you need guidance on how to create a Client profile, see this article How to Add a Client to Your Agency Hub.

Please note: if you are using a rostering integration your Client's profile will already be in your agency hub, with some fields pre-populated which means you will not need to repeat those steps!

Click the Edit button, here you will be able to add all the basic information including a profile picture. If you need a step-by-step guide on how to upload a profile picture see this article - How to Add a Picture to Your Client's Profile.

Profile: Here you can fill in personal information including their preferred name (this will show in the app under care plan), pronouns and their DOB. Here, you can also add a picture of your Client which can be seen on the Birdie app.

Contact details: Here you can add the Client's primary and secondary phone numbers as well as their address. Currently, they can only have one address on their profile. Make sure to use the searchable address function if you are using geolocation, this ensures that you can see if Carers are going to the right address.

In this section, you can also add access details, which can be information such as what door to enter, key codes or any information your Carer needs to know about accessing the property.

Highlights: You can write additional care or non-care-related details in this section. For example, you may want to log when a Client becomes inactive and become active again, you may also want to write interesting facts about the Client. It can also be used to record a summary of the Client's care journey or to make a note of any relevant updates that Carers should be aware of before visiting.

There is no character limit to these sections so you are free to capture as many details as necessary.

Culture and Religion: In this section, you can add more specific information about the Clients' culture and religion and how this may affect the care they wish to receive.

Sexuality: If you do not collect this information, this section can be skipped. If you do collect this information you can enter details such as their assigned sex at birth, their gender identity and their sexual preference. You can further note how this can impact the care they wish to receive.

Life history: Here you can note what the Client's previous job and occupation were as well as any significant places or people in their lives. This is helpful to the Carers so that they can understand a bit more about the person they are caring for.

Preferences: Here you can capture information about routines and practices and why they may be important to them or impact their care, furthermore you can capture dislikes and any hobbies and interests, this can help your Carers understand a bit more about the person they are caring for.

Health details: Here you can add specific details related to a Client's medical and clinical background including their NHS number, you can only enter 1 NHS per Client.

Medical history: When searching for medical conditions in the medical history section, make sure you type out (do not copy and paste) the entire name of the condition, also consider that the medical condition may be under its clinical name e.g. a stroke is also known as a cerebrovascular accident. This ensures that the database can accurately search for the condition. This information will then pull through to the medical care plan for you to capture more details.

Medical support: Here you can note whether you provide or do not provide medicine support for the Client.

Allergies and intolerances: Here you can write any information about allergies and intolerances that your Client may have. As a safety precaution, you will need to write something in this box in order to save the page. If the Client has no allergies or intolerances you can write N/A in the box.

Doctor/GP: Here you can note the GP's name and number. This will be visible to the Carers in the app.

Pharmacist: Here you can note the Pharmacy name, number and address. This will be visible to the Carers in the app.

Key Contacts: This section can be used to add information about the Client's nominated next-of-kin/emergency contacts.

Please note: any NoK/emergency contacts saved here will be automatically added to the Care Circle section ready for you to invite them to the family app if applicable.

Other Professionals: This section can be used to add information about any other healthcare professional that is relevant to the Client. This could be a social worker, dietician or occupational therapist for example.

In this section, advanced care planning and decisions can be recorded to plan for any future care and support. You can log whether a Client has:

Unique client identifier: Here you can add a free-text unique identifier for each of your Clients. This is ideal when submitting a statutory notification to the CQC or when communicating about your Clients with external stakeholders to protect privacy and minimise the sharing of personal data.

Status: Here you can input the service start date and the status of the Client and enter a period of inactivity if you are utilising this feature.

Regulated care: Here you can state whether the Client receives regulated care or not. For example, personal care is defined as a 'regulated activity' by the CQC.

Risk management: Here you can assign an overall risk level to the Client in line with your contingency plan. At Birdie, we use a RAG status (Red, Amber, Green). The way you choose to make use of the risk level statuses is up to you.

For example, in the case of an emergency, you may use green status to identify Clients who could have their visits replaced by a phone call or postponed, the amber for those who could have fewer visits than usual, with the occasional call to check if a visit is necessary and the red status for Client's who need to have all their visits attended.

Accessible information standard: Here you can note whether the Client has any communication or information needs and what their preferred method of contact for admin matters are.

Funding arrangements: Here you can note what funding arrangements this Client has, this can be local authority, private etc., as well as their Local authority ID.

Matching: If you do not collect this information, this section can be skipped. Here you can input Carers preferences regarding gender and what group they will be in, a Client can only be in one group.

Once you have created your Client's profile, you can build a care plan, risk assessments and add medication to ensure that your Carers have the most person-centred profile to carry out safe and responsive care.