With this year’s conference centred around the digital transformation of social care, our speakers talked about what Access Local Government & Technology Enabled Care has to offer care providers and local government; showcasing our social care solutions and engaging with guests to gauge their needs, so that we can rise to meet them now and beyond.
Here’s our full overview of the day’s sessions we attended, along with the key themes, highlights and reflections.
10.00 - 10.20: Introduction to LG & TEC
Andy Sparkes, General Manager for Local Government, kicked off proceedings by showcasing just how involved The Access Group are with the care industry.
Access supports 200+ local authorities with our Social Care, Education and Youth Services solutions, as well as 45+ NHS Trusts using our healthcare solutions and a further 10,000 registered care providers across home care and care homes.
Addressing the room, Andy’s point was simple: central policy is driving significant change within the Health and Social care ecosystem, and we’re here to help the industry adapt to these changes and to flourish. Our strategy is to aid the transformation of service delivery through integration, assistive technology and AI - all of which were dedicated sections to come throughout the day.
The introduction ended with a showcase video, voiced by yours truly, articulating the improvements Access Evo Social Care seeks to offer to customers going forward.
10.20 - 11.00: Introducing Evo
Chris Wilson, Product Director for Integrated Care, and Jason Stevens, Head of Product (pictured above) delivered perhaps the most revelatory segment of the day: introducing Access Evo, a new AI experience designed to enhance The Access Group’s suite of software solutions to do more for the customer.
The end goal is for a singular feed of information, regardless of product(s). The AI that Evo will be implementing will learn user behaviour and customise these feeds, prioritising the more regularly used solutions and pathways to tailor spaces. Integrating processes and data is at the heart of the development of Evo, seeking to find new insights and new benefits for social care delivery.
The initial plan however is to gradually implement changes through Access Evo: first in subtleties like colour schemes and typefaces, but then improving the user experience in line with the ethos ‘I always know where to go’.
An example given by Chris and Jason was regards Access Mosaic, our social care case management and finance platform. With Evo involved, it can do the data retrieval that is currently manually performed, as well as offer related links and prompts.
Whilst the provider portal is not yet in Evo, there is development progress towards this aiming for delivery later this year. The good news for customers is that Access Evo will be mobile-based too, available on both iOS and Android.
11.00 - 11.30: Technology Enabled Care
Alex Nash (Head of Product) and Nerys Hebdon (Head of TEC Customer Enablement) delivered our second segment of the day, talking about Access Technology - Enabled Care and the growing importance of digital assistance in daily life for care recipients.
Nerys’ introduction began with an anecdote about her own father’s dementia and an instance of him going astray en route to the local chip shop - which was closed and so he went onwards to the next one he knew but was out of sight, out of contact, and causing everyone significant concern despite being safe and well.
The humanising factor brought through a few elements worth repeating:
- 131,000 roles (8%) in Adult Social Care unfilled in 2023/24
- 1.7M people living with dementia forecast by 2040
- 5.8M people in the UK are Unpaid Carers
The reality is that care as a sector is struggling, and we need to offset that struggle with technological solutions. With TEC, we can scale the delivery of social care whilst reducing the costs associated with that level of care.
Technology Enabled Care is about promoting dignity, independence, and quality of life, but in a quick show of hands in the hall, most attendees and their organisations were still analogue when it comes to care delivery and observation.
Testimony from Wigan Council revealed them to be fully digitised and ahead of the curve, with their attendee stating how they needed more reliability, visibility, control, and the ability to collaborate and share information or data. This was also echoed by Katy Ball from Nottinghamshire County Council, who was in attendance and spoke about how NCC are currently 50% through their digitisation process and onboarding of TEC - to achieve the same things as listed above.
A further point about training was made in this session, with our hosts pointing out the importance of training and the proven benefit that more training leads to more referrals, as well as overcoming the known confidence issues some carers have with both the implementation of telecare and the usage of it for assessment purposes. That hesitancy has an impact on the success of preventative care, but also diminishes the return on investment - through cost savings, cost avoidance, but also in regards to hospital admission rates, staff stress and burnout challenges, and the need for night staff versus the hardware doing the monitoring.
TEC has a lot to offer, but there’s more needs doing to get everybody on board with the processes and technology at hand to ensure an effective and beneficial transition.
12.00 - 12.30: Access NotesCentre
Chris Wilson returned for our final talk before lunch to explore Access NotesCentre, our new solution to digitally record and transcript audio.
The goal is to reclaim time for social workers, with the documentation burden seeing up to 65% of a social worker’s week spent on paperwork - according to statistics from the British Association of Social Workers, 2023. It should come as no surprise then that this administrative burden is leading to higher burnout rates. Social Work England in 2020 stated that 40% of social workers were considering leaving the profession within five years.
As system pressures increase with the growing demand for adult social care and tighter budgets, aids like Access NotesCentre become increasingly more in need and more beneficial. This is why we developed our own proprietary social care AI model, rather than utilising existing public AI tools.
This new dictation solution is available via mobile app or web browser. It can be used for voice recordings or direct text entry, and can have pre-configured templates and forms established. You can edit notes and change wording or formatting, you can access a full audit trail from the original recording through to transcripts and the final notes, and you have peace of mind with regular reports and oversight about user activity.
Chris's final point was this: we want the content generated by NotesCentre to be relevant. We want to provide you a tailored AI experience that suits your organisational preferences (policy, language, tone etc) but still keeps things simple.
12.30 - 1.15: Workshop –Your priorities for the use of AI
The final segment before lunch was a speaker-less discussion, and a little less than the initially planned 45 minutes due the sheer volume of audience interaction and engagement in the previous segments - something we were extremely pleased to see.
In this workshop, attendees were encouraged to detail their digitisation journey so far, their involvement with AI tools (if any), and their plans for the future regarding analogue to digital, overhauling archaic systems, or the addition of new tools to their arsenal.
2.15 - 2.45: Access Test Automation for Mosaic
After lunch and we were back at it with Jason Stevens and Stuart Ives (pictured above) to explore how artificial intelligence will overhaul the test automation processes. Access Mosaic was chosen as the demonstration software for this talk, to showcase where AI would be beneficial.
Currently, manual testing takes approximately 14 weeks for a software update to be inspected, approved and deployed. Six weeks of this is User Acceptance Testing. With Access Evo in the mix, the developer team are hoping to bring UAT down to just one week, and the overall deployment to seven weeks.
Using Microsoft Visual Studio on local PCs, test packs are executed - converting customer-provided manual test scripts into automated tests. The aim is to significantly reduce manual effort; increasing efficiencies, saving time and cost.
There were some fair audience challenges to the costings and savings demonstrated by Access: one attendee from Derbyshire County Council pointed out that whilst there might be 50 people working for eight weeks on testing, this would be more like two hours per week and not all those people at the same time.
For now, the automated testing will be available to support finance aspects of workflow but not reporting, though again that is something in the pipeline with Access developers. The tests will work with solutions like Core+ and Abacus however, and more and more solutions will come into play as we work through this calendar year and into 2026.
2.45 - 3.15: Utilising Access Community Gateway in your LA
Access Community Gateway is a self-assessment solution usable by citizens to oversee their cases. It’s also suitable for professionals to save the need for direct access into Mosaic. This talk from Miles Winterburn, Product Owner for ACG, sought to advocate for more use of Access Community Gateway by local authorities.
As with all the previous talks, the key points surround optimisation and efficiency: leveraging technological improvements like AI (provided by Access Evo) to reduce admin time by simplifying workflows, increase citizen satisfaction through greater inclusion in their own wellbeing processes, and more accurate data through better form options.
Miles finished up by presented a demo of ACG in action, and how it can be utilised for carer assessments, financial assessments, and social care self-assessments amongst other things.
3.15 - 3.45: The ‘Evo’lution of Mosaic Reporting
The final talk of the day came from Beth Askwith (Product Owner) and Stuart Ives (Products and Engineering Director). They broke down the problematic nature of reporting through Access Mosaic at present, and how Access Evo would level-up the software to deliver much more.
They referenced issues with a lack of data availability, duplication, problems concerning consent and choice, the data literacy of users, and the timeliness of generated information or data.
The technical side refers to data lakes and pagination and all sorts of things that allow Data as a Service (DaaS) to exist, but the simplified pitch is this: our existing support solution doesn’t always work to the extent that we want it to, but Access Evo’s AI can join the dots and fill the gaps. We want our clients to engage and guide our build process, so we can then return the favour to them through guaranteed performance. Help us to help you, and together we can provide the data quality desired, flag anomalies, and deliver much clearer visualisation of what’s actually going on in your services.
3.45 - 4.00: Wrap Up of the Day
Andy Sparkes and Carrie Renton, our compere for the day, signed off from the Crowne Plaza and thanked all attendees for travelling to the NEC but also for being so engaging. People all across the room asked questions of us, queried each other, and made new contacts in our workshop and lunch periods, and for us that’s what these events are about: honing our solutions, but also building consensus so that both we and our users know what’s wanted from software solutions.
AI is the future, but without industry input it lacks focus and purpose, and aimless development doesn’t achieve the rapid benefits the social care sector needs. This is why we’re so pleased at how the conference went, and we hope to see you all again next year for more discussions, debates, and exciting developments.
