Carmarthenshire’s Community Care Service - Case Study

At the end of 2018 Carmarthenshire’s Department for Communities embarked on implementing technology to modernise their service and delivery.

Following a competitive tendering process, the Council chose CM’s (now Access CM’s) long-established technology to plan and record care visits, reduce paper-based systems, empower Support Workers with secure, real-time information and improve transparency / reporting on service delivery.

The technology’s impact was acknowledged at the highest level within the Council, when it won a Transformation, Innovation and Change Award.  

The benefits

Nicola Jones, Project Officer in the Department for Communities explained some of the benefits of using the technology:

“Before implementing Access CM’s scheduling, monitoring and CMBI reporting tool we had very little intelligence about how the service was performing. Getting meaningful information about the service was difficult and time-consuming. Access CM’s technology has changed that. Now we can track people’s journey from the point they come into the service until the point they leave or move to a long-term care package.

We can easily report against our SLA with the Health Board, quantifying where people are in the 6-week process, identifying increases or decreases in requirements. Previously we simply did not have that level of information.

Having accurate data isn’t just helpful in terms of managing the service, it is also used to ensure Service User financial contributions are based on the care they actually receive. This level of transparency is helpful to all parties.

The Access CM Scheduling system has allowed us to be more responsive to Service User needs and we use the competency levels and skills for matching the right Support Worker to each visit. For some people it is important to have a Support Worker who is Welsh speaking and the technology allows us to schedule visits to meet that criteria.

Our Support Workers have all the information they need on their mobile device, if there are any changes to their rota or the Service User’s situation they are notified immediately.   

Supervisors find the system a powerful management tool giving them a comprehensive view of service delivery. They have a daily dashboard which allows them to see what is happening and ensure the technology is being used correctly to log in and out of visits.

The data now available from the reporting tool, Access CMBI, has allowed the Service and Long Term Service to improve efficiency with everything from use of contracted hours to mileage between visits. Access CMBI not only allows us to look at individuals receiving care but has provided oversight of the bigger picture.

This oversight was particularly crucial at the height of the pandemic as it meant we could easily see if we had capacity to take on new packages, monitor sickness levels and see if people were refusing visits.    

We also found having the system in place enabled us to easily work remotely as everyone could login and carry on accessing all the information they needed. The service undertook a massive programme of check-in calls to help combat isolation and loneliness – making over 3000 calls during lockdown.

Information was recorded and reported on through the Access CM solution, allowing us to attribute a level of risk against each Service User and identify any additional services they might need, like food parcels.    

Conclusion  

Since introducing the technology we have been empowered with information to improve the efficiency and person-centred focus of our service, and we are proud of the difference this is making, even during the most difficult of times.