Tameside Council - Case Study 

Julia Featherstone, Assistant Team Manager, has extensive experience in the social care sector and her interest in technology meant she was ideal to lead the project. Julia explained how Access CM’s solutions are helping Tameside’s reablement service.

“Running the service was very labour intensive – especially the amount of time we had to spend on the telephones briefing staff about their rotas. Friday afternoons would be pressure points because we had to make sure everyone had information for over the weekend, and if someone was off sick you’d have to contact all the people you needed to cover their visits. Now with Access CM Scheduling and Access CM Mobile everything is done at the click of a button and we’ve dramatically reduced telephone calls.

The benefits

“The Access CM system means we’re able to use our staff more efficiently. We used to rely on casual staff to fill the gaps but now we can use our staff to cover all the visits. It’s also so much easier to make changes to rotas at short notice. The system allows us to plan our resources better.

“We are empowered with information we didn’t have before. We now have robust audit trails and can easily look at quality indicators like continuity of care, missed & late visits which would have been very difficult and time consuming previously.

“We have a better understanding about each care package – we can see if visits need to be increased, decreased or dropped based on patterns of actual care delivery. We never previously decreased calls but now the data tells us if particular visits aren’t required – which means the reablement service is working. We can also match our shift patterns to align with care requirements. We used to have lots of workers start at 7am but feedback from Service Users indicated they didn’t want their first visit until later so we could easily adapt.

“The Care Workers like the fact that they no longer have to phone the office (especially on their day off). They appreciate having all the information they need available to them in real-time and like to be able to look ahead at their schedules. We’ve been working with them to make sure they have all the details they find useful available in the app.

“One of the big benefits of implementing the technology is we now have more time. We’re using that to improve services and look at other ways we can support our Service Users. It can be as simple as arranging book swaps or helping them with appointments but we now have the resources to look beyond the visits and enrich their lives further.”

Conclusion

Using this time to reflect, Julia is surprised how far they’ve come and what progress they’ve made since the days of being consumed with communicating details of rotas and manually dealing with last minute changes. The efficiencies the technology has brought are having a positive impact every day.

“We’re better informed since implementing Access CM’s care management solutions. We have greater oversight of service delivery with all our data in one place. There’s been a huge shift in the way we communicate which has brought benefits to our Care Workers and ultimately, we have more time to focus on the quality of our service. My advice to other Local Authorities is ‘go for it!’. Having the right technology makes such a difference.”