Sandwell’s Reablement Service - Case Study

Sandwell’s Short-Term Assessment and Reablement service ‘STAR’, is the reablement and assessment service for adults who are leaving hospital, rehab/intermediate care beds or people within their own homes who are at risk of hospital admission or need a significant increase in their care package.

STAR - provides assessment and reablement for a period of up to 6 weeks to maximise someone's independence and potential to live in the community.

In 2018 STAR implemented Access CM scheduling and mobile visit monitoring (which at that time was known as CallConfirmLive!) with the following aims:

• drive efficiencies by making the best use of available staff
• ensure that calls are completed in line with a person’s care plan and support personalisation
• help safeguard lone workers and improve communication with field-based workers
• provide real-time information on care delivery

Robin Welsh, Project Manager and Julie Hunter, Social Care Coordinator at Sandwell Council share details of the first-year deliverables. As the Project Team their first priority was to get the set up right: “We took our time with the implementation to get the rotas and rotations just right. The CM team were brilliant in supporting us. The training was superb.”

Making best use of available staff to reduce travel time and improve productivity

“The system delivers more efficient travel routes for planned visits to Service Users. The scoring system assigns the nearest Carer to minimise travel time and mileage which allows us to maximise visit time. Senior Staff know where Carers are in real-time which enables them to reschedule easily. This wasn’t possible before we implemented Access CM. This has enhanced the quality of service provided to Service Users, responding to change in needs and improve personalisation.”

“Access CM improves performance, promotes greater efficiency, eliminates unnecessary waste, reduces duplication and makes better use of resources.”

Supporting quality care delivery and personalisation

“Access CM improves business continuity for Service Users to meet the needs of vulnerable people. We’ve set up the scoring on the system to support continuity of care so staff that have visited before will be selected first.

This promotes personalisation for Service Users and allows them to see a friendly face they are familiar with. Before implementing Access CM it was difficult to monitor continuity of care, so this is a definite improvement. It also improves the ability to mobilise the staff and gives us flexibility to move staff around.”

Safeguarding lone workers

“There is improved health and safety for staff with monitoring in place, some Carers thought the system was a bit ‘big brother’ initially but it hasn’t taken long for them to recognise the lone worker benefits.” 

Improved Communication Benefits

“Using the in-app messaging makes communication more robust. Whether we’re sending a message to an individual, or globally to the whole team, we know it’s been read. In addition to advising about change of visit times, we use it for sending training information and we have an audit trail, so we know staff have read the message.”

Using the real-time service delivery data

“Access CM delivers management information that we didn’t have before. Knowing the actual length of visits is important for ensuring people are getting the right visits to meet their individual needs. We can easily see now if visits are shorter or longer than we were expecting and review their care & support plan.”  It has improved the collection, quality, recording, sharing and exchange of relevant and timely management information to promote greater outcomes within the Service User journey.” 

“If a Service User says they haven’t had a visit or the Carer didn’t stay the full half hour we can check the data. This can be useful for concerned family members too.”

Robin and Julie conclude by explaining the biggest benefit of implementing the technology:

“Access CM makes it easy to schedule staff so we get the right Carer to the right Service User at the right time. We’ve reduced travel time whilst improving personalisation.”