How to improve productivity and efficiency in health and social care
A study by research specialist Loud House has highlighted key productivity issues in a number of UK sectors of the economy, including social care.
The findings are concerning in places, intriguing and encouraging in others, especially when it comes to what social care providers feel they could do if more productive and freed from ‘non-value-added’ activities.
The owners and directors of care providers that responded to the survey pointed at paperwork, processing timesheets, rostering and typing up information as just some of the big gripes that their teams frequently cited as getting in the way of doing what is truly important.
The results
Of the owners and directors of care companies surveyed, in domiciliary, residential and supported living care services:
- 96% agreed/strongly agreed they want their organisation to be more productive
- 98% believe improving productivity is very important/crucial
- 97% agreed/strongly agreed that improving productivity would have a big impact on their organisation
Clearly there is an undeniable consensus that care organisations individually, and the sector as a whole, needs to improve productivity.
Time lost
In terms of the cost of low productivity in care, owners and directors surveyed estimated that managers spent 8 hours per week, and care workers 6 hours per week, on ‘non-value-added tasks’.
Per year this is equal to 448 hours per manager and 312 hours per care worker, all spent on the kind of activities that don’t add value into the business. This isn’t hours spent delivering care, or learning new and essential skills, hiring quality candidates and so on.
This is those culminative hours upon hours spent on admin, on duplicating information, on driving round to collect care notes and MAR charts, on gathering up all the stacks of paper-records for audits and many other of those all-too-familiar tasks in social care that sap time away from doing the care itself.
Money spent
That time spent on non-value-added tasks has a financial cost. In terms of wages alone, based on the minimum estimate, the cost for care providers is £66 per week or £2562 per year for each carer employed.
For each manager, this is equal to £67 per week or £3500 per year. Therefore, the amount that typical and even small care providers are spending on non-value-added tasks runs into the tens and hundreds of thousands of pounds annually.
We know that some of this cost is unavoidable. Yet as many care providers have shown, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds can be grabbed back by increasing productivity with readily available care management software.
The missed opportunity
Low productivity also has a cost aside from time and money. Namely the ability for care organisations to do what they feel is most important to sustaining and improving their services. This is something we have explored by interviewing providers across social care, to see what they have improved with more freedom and more time.
The chart below shows what care owners and directors said when asked “What would more productivity do for your organisation”:
Clearly, these directors and owners of care businesses recognise a link between the non-value-added tasks and reduced staff engagement/happiness. There are a number of potential causes for this.
Firstly, people who go into and stay in social care are not your typical bureaucrats. They are people who get satisfaction from doing things, from helping others, from taking action, not from completing and organising paperwork.
Secondly the sheer amount of time spent on these non-value-added tasks in a sector with very tough challenges around retention, means that staff are always rushing, always catching up, and this of course increases stress and can make things seem hopeless in the worst cases.
Improving services
The second highest response; that improving productivity would help providers improve quality of service is an interesting point.
One obvious aspect of this, is having the time do take a real assessment of different parts of the organisation, identify the weaknesses and strengths and then take actions to improve. This process in itself can be made less admin heavy, managed more effectively and easy through systems like Access Care Compliance.
The second aspect, and one that doesn’t spring to mind straight away is the ability to do more, to go above and beyond the daily rigours of providing care.
This is something the CQC noted in an inspection of New Directions Flexible Social Care, who were rated Outstanding:
“The electronic system used allowed management to spend considerably more time with people and staff to focus on the quality of support instead of spending time completing audits and action plans. People told us that the use of technology has enabled staff to spend more time with them and develop more innovative ideas.”
Read their full inspection report
The benefits of being able to have more time, to organise and run the kinds of initiatives that can make a huge difference to the health and happiness of people has been highlighted in the Teaching Forgotten Skills campaign.
The campaign, supported by academics on dementia, aging and child development, aims to encourage more intergenerational care projects, to help alleviate loneliness and improve the mental wellbeing of old and young alike:
Care providers short-changed by their systems?
Care providers were asked if they felt they got “maximum productivity” from their systems, of those that said yes:
- 26% report managers spend ¼ of their working hours on non-value-added tasks
- 13% say managers spend more than half their working hours on non-value-added tasks
Which begs the question, are software providers, consultants and sector influencers failing to get the message out there about the kind of software that is now available and the level of productivity improvements that are available to care providers?
Bay Care Domiciliary Care and New Directions Flexible Social Care are just two notable examples of care providers that have made great productivity and service quality improvements by harnessing the best software on the market.
More providers need to know that improving and making the most of their systems is key to improving their overall productivity, growth, and as highlighted above, the quality of their services.
Disconnected systems
Of all the care providers that disagreed that their systems were giving them maximum productivity, 44% cited lack of integration as they key barrier to getting more productivity from those systems.
This is something Access are uniquely addressing. As the number of solutions we provide to care providers has grown we have recognised the need, not just to integrate all of them, but to provide a single platform, so that users can see the data from all their systems in one platform.
This platform is Access Workspace and it will be that fundamental step forward, to achieve a truly singular system for all the software care providers use, that gives different people - like area managers, branch managers, coordinators, people in finance and HR or managing directors - the specific information they need, when they need it.
The way forward for improved productivity and efficiency
Productivity is an issue throughout UK business. Too many employees spend too much time on tasks that deliver little or no benefit to the organisation and it's aims.
Investing in software to automate these non-value-added tasks and take the burden off staff and managers alike is the most commonly used, most tested, and most proven method of improving productivity.
Making all this information that forms part of your admin digital brings a coincidental benefits: Integration, intelligence and insight. In the real world this means that someone overseeing 10 care homes can monitor the performance and the risks in all of them, without hours spent gathering and auditing information.
It means being able to spot trends behind incidents and what hidden factors might be causing differences in quality of care. It means identifying where your staffing is most precarious, where agency cost is highest and how this can be reduced.
Rather than being a weight around you and your team's neck, the information your systems automatically collect and process becomes a valuable tool to safeguard, monitor and improve -not only your service quality but your financial stability and growth too.
