New Feature Release: Home Facilities

Care and Nursing Home Facility Lists

Releasing our new add and update home form has been very successful and we have decided to add some more data points to our database. We have complied a list of what we think is a good start, you can see the list at the bottom of this post.

Form

Our form makes use of check boxes for inputting the homes specialisms, activities and facilities we decided that these are still be for multiple choice form fields.

We feel our form is complete now but as always we will be reviewing it in time so we can make sure its up to date and relevant we will also be reviewing both our activities and facilities lists to make sure there is no overlap between the two.

Listing

Our listing pages now have a new tab for displaying the homes facilities list we are considering combining both the activities tab and the facilities tab because they are similar and would also bulk up the pages a bit more rather than a small list on both pages. It also makes it one less click for our visitors so maybe in the future we will implement this.

It is already a popular feature and we have had a submission every day so far so we consider it a success so far and we hope that our visitors and home owners and managers find it a useful tool for them to take advantage of.

Conclusion

If you are a care manager or owner and your home is listed then all you have to do to add your facilities is go to your homes listing page and click the edit homes details link to open the wiki form.

Also I will also remind visitors they are encourage to help add any information we maybe missing for a listing.

Facilities List

Aromatherapy
Assisted Bath
Assisted Shower
Cable TV
Car Park
Cater for Special Diets
Chiropody
Companion Rooms
Dentist
Dining Room
En-suite Bath
En-suite Shower
En-suite Toilet
Garden
Hairdressing
Hydrotherapy
Internet
Jacuzzi
Laundry
Lounge
Massage
Minibus
Nurse Call System
Open Visits
Optician
PassengerLift
Personal Possessions
Pets
Physiotherapy
Purpose Built
Reflexology
Religious Services
Retained or Personal GP
Secure Storage
Sensory Room
Shop
Single Rooms
Stair Lift
Tea and Coffee Making
Telephone Points
Television Points
Wheelchair Access
Wireless Internet

Visitor Care and Nursing Home Lists

Allowing Visitors to Save Personal Lists

Our  most recent release has added support for allowing visitors to save care homes and agencies to their own personal list of homes which can then be compared and viewed at a later date.

Saving Lists

To save a home the visitor clicks the Save Home link highlighted red in the screen shot below this link has an onclick handler registered to run the add method which contains the JavaScript for saving.

Town Listing with Save Link

HomeList.js provides all the client side functionality we need and it is this class which implements the add method mentioned above. We also make use of an external class name uuid.core.js which we use to generate a UUID for each visitor.

Our UUID uses version 4 of the UUID specification which can be found here we decided to use an existing implementation because if you look at the code I dont think it can be done any better.

We save this UUID in a cookie for two months and all homes added to a visitor list are deleted after seven days. Another constraint we have is that a visitor can only save 20 items to their list.

Listing Page with Save Link

Visitors can also add homes to their list from the actual listing page of the home which is highlighted red in the picture above.

Viewing Lists

Visitors can view their own lists by clicking the View Saved Homes link which is located in the top left corner of all pages and is highlighted red in the screen shot below. This link uses the top and right CSS properties with a position of absolute.

The current version only allows certain comparisons but we plan on increasing what you can compare and also select only what you want to see in later versions.

Visitor List

Conclusion

This feature has already been well accepted by our visitors and we are currently monitoring its usage and hope to improve the service even more in the future.

We also released a number of other features with this release and we will be writing about them in future postings so stay tuned.