Derbyshire County Council and MaxCare - Case study
Derbyshire County Council has been using Access CM to handle reablement and community health, and at the heart of that care management has been our MaxCare module.
For the uninitiated, reablement is about helping people to regain independence. This can be lost at any age in life due to illness or disability, and more and more local authorities are introducing reablement services to help restore independence and reduce the demand for care; something that can strain services but also be costly to individuals or their families.
Derbyshire County Council and MaxCare
Derbyshire County Council’s need for MaxCare is simple: demand for care is growing as healthcare improves and people live longer. This, combined with financial pressures, legislation regards the authority’s duty of care, and the complications around travel reimbursement for carers and pay… it gets complicated very quickly. Complex matters require a lot of human attention and working hours, which costs, but an investment into a software solution can manage it for you. This is a more significant investment in the short-term, but pays itself off and pays back even more in the long-term.
MaxCare is an Access CM module that optimises the delivery of community care, especially reablement. With its unique series of algorithms and fully customisable business rules, MaxCare can rapidly produce an optimised care schedule or a rota for care providers. This is ideal in the fast-paced environment that is community health, where client needs can change within the hour, let alone every day.
Derbyshire County Council brought in MaxCare to:
- Handle the volume of clients and carers respectively.
- Automate sign-in client calls.
- Pre-plan calls based on the carer’s availability and travel range, combined with the client’s location and the carer’s care run for any given day.
- Enhance learning or training for new schedulers, so they are quicker to understand the complexity of client needs versus carer capacity across the region.
- Support quick adjustments to schedules or plans based on adoc changes, sickness, or carer leave.
- Provide greater scheduling insights and quicker preparation, allowing for long-term previews or hourly alterations.
Ultimately, humans make errors. People take time to learn things, but you’re not always guaranteed to attract local talent or that local applicants are the most suited to the role in question. Derbyshire County Council has combatted this with MaxCare, allowing the software tool to handle the elements of geographical knowledge and the rule-set to ensure no care planning mistakes. This then frees up the scheduling team and DSOs to focus on reablement or other aspects of community care.
Financially, this has helped Derbyshire downsize their operational managers – the DSOs – into the scheduling team. This is a modestly staffed unit but highly efficient thanks to the automation in place; a happy balance of people to be engaged with and to chase leads, while the technology does the legwork and the complex formulations.
According to Derbyshire Council, there are still ongoing tweaks and configurations being made to MaxCare and Access CM as they learn more or their needs change – whether weekly, monthly or beyond – but they’re extremely satisfied with the solution and the consistency it is providing.
“It's a very, very effective system and it I think helps us. It supports us with the heavy lifting”
- Bryde Beighton, Business Services Manager at Derbyshire County Council
The Access Group – Working for Derbyshire County Council
The MaxCare module is just one part of the wider Access CM solution that is working hard to help Derbyshire County Council deliver the best quality care services to the local population.
Derbyshire were in urgent need of a modern software solution to help support the delivery of adult social care, child care services, and youth justice services. Issues with time-consuming administration, duplicated effort, and a lack of data capture and analysis hindered both their short-term and long-term duties as the local authority.
Read more in our Derbyshire County Council case study about their partnership with The Access Group to see their duties, more of the challenges faced, and how we overcame them together.