Dundee Council - Case Study

Who are Dundee City Council?

Dundee City Council brings together health and social care services for individuals and communities in Dundee. They work hard to respond to the needs of the local population by delivering services that focus on providing the best outcomes possible.

Through providing person-centred care they aim to deliver the best continuity of care which is adaptable as care needs change.

What were the challenges?

Prior to using our products, Dundee City Council were using multiple systems, processes, and spreadsheets to input their information and data across their services including children, adults, finance, criminal justice, and education services. This meant that there was often a lot duplication of inputting data from one system to the next.

These processes were very labour intensive and took up long periods of time so more staff were needed to manage the workload. Through relying on spreadsheets and more manual processes they were at risk of losing data and not having their systems up to date. This then puts the quality of care and support they deliver at risk due to support workers not having all the information they need before a visit.

What was the solution?

Dundee City Council therefore needed a solution that could manage these processes more efficiently to provide a better visibility across their care market.

They chose both our Access Mosaic and Access CM software as we offered solutions that enabled them to have all the information needed stored on a singular platform for the first time and a solution that help support them in managing the 3rd party organisations they work with.

Our CM solution offered software that allowed all their data and information to be centralised into one place to make scheduling visits easier, less time-consuming, and more adaptable to care needs.

Our Mosaic solution help improve council staff’s understanding of its service users by managing them better and providing a single digital view of each case, joining records together for digital care.

Dundee City Council started using our Mosaic software in 2016 and our CM software in October 2018 and has continued working with us since. Now, more recently, they have been one of the first organisations to integrate their CM software with our Mosaic Social Care Record.

By using both of our products and integrating them it means they do not have to double enter their data into our CM software as the information comes directly through from Mosaic. This saves time on administrative tasks and allows more time to be spent concentrating on delivering better quality care. This, in turn, has created a new way of working for Dundee City Council enabling council staff to access caseloads quickly all from one platform to reduce time on admin and spend more time with clients, ultimately transforming the delivery of its health, and social care, and local government services.

The outcomes:

By using both Mosaic and CM over the years, Dundee City Council have been able to experience a wide range of benefits to improve the quality of the health, social care, and local government services they serve. The video below explains what they have benefitted specifically from using Mosaic and integrating it with CM.

1. Time efficiencies

One of the biggest outcomes Dundee City Council has experienced since integrating our CM and Mosaic solution is the saving on time. Having all data centralised in place has meant their dependency on spreadsheets and manual processes is no longer needed, meaning they have been able to digitally transform their processes for the better.

Now their time spent on administrative tasks has dropped dramatically so more time can be spent concentrating on organising and delivering the best care and support to their community, especially for more vulnerable populations.

Due to saving time on administrative tasks their scheduling of visits has become more streamlined and teams can now be more prepared when there is sickness or when support workers are off on annual leave. This has been extremely beneficial for their residents living with dementia as it means changes can be planned with minimal disruption or confusion.

Dundee City Council offers a variety of care and support services to their residents across their local community so having all the service users' records in one place makes it easier to track a service user’s journey and easily identifies if their needs have changed and what other support they may need. This has helped invoicing and billing be more accurate due to constantly updating as needs change causing little to no disruption to their billing process.

Prior to using Access CM whenever we needed to bill someone we had to input all the information onto one system and then another one. It was very labour intensive. Now due to using Access CM all this can be done automatically. It’s much easier.

Jackie Hall, IT Manager, Dundee City Council

2. Adding new Services

Another great outcome we have been able to achieve together is adding more services to their portfolio.

Dundee City Council goes above and beyond to provide the best support possible to encourage individuals to live more independent lives. One of the ways they do this is through their food delivery service.

This service allows residents to select the meals they would like for dinner so more vulnerable residents can still have a well-balanced cooked meal every day. Once orders are placed they are sent across to the kitchens, which make them fresh, and the council then organises travel routes to get them delivered.

Dundee City Council asked if they could add this service to their Access CM software. We were more than happy to onboard this service to make it even easier to schedule, organise, and track.

Here it was easier to organise routes by locality to make travel routes more efficient and cost-effective. Adding this service to the system also allowed mileage to be recorded automatically to streamline the billing process further and avoid relying on paper and manual processes.

Through this service, service-users and their families can be reassured that they are eating well and that they also have the flexibility to change their orders if they want to due to the council cooking the meals fresh every day.

Here service users can also feel a part of the service to encourage their independence by allowing them to choose the meals they would like as well as change their mind if they want to.

3. Improved working relationships

A final major benefit Dundee City Council has experienced since working with us is the improvement of their working relationships.

Through being able to consistently schedule and accurately bill other third-party organisations they work with, their working relationships have been able to remain positive to continue to put the welfare of their residents first to deliver the best person-centred care.

Also at The Access Group, we work hard to ensure that all our customers have good working relationships with us, and Dundee City Council is no different. We always listen to their feedback and try to improve our software further to make their user experience even better.

We’ve listened to the feedback surrounding our Access CM app for example and improved it to make their experience on the app more user friendly. Despite the highly positive feedback including our offline functionality and the ability to provide support workers with all the information they need while they are on the move, we still wanted to improve our software further. Now we have enhanced our app to overcome these issues to ensure that our Access CM software and Access Mosaic software are easy to use always regardless of your location.

Dundee City Council is also one of the first organisations to integrate their Access CM software with our Mosaic Social Care Record. This allows Dundee City Council to input information on their care and support purchases so both stakeholders and service users can have the information they need if they want to repurchase.

It also allows all information on each resident’s care record to be inputted once on our Mosaic platform and fed straight through to our CM software. This then prevents the need to input data from one system to the next and instead offers a complete end-to-end digital process to easily implement all auditing and reporting more efficiently.

Here our collaborative partnership has also enabled our software to have the flexibility needed to customise forms quickly when the Scottish government makes changes to legislation and requirements to shorten any delays from service users to minimise strain and always keep care and support services fully compliant. Now we can work together to respond to any changes streamlining day-to-day interaction between staff and service users so procedures are tighter and easier to navigate for everyone involved.

Through our collaborative approach, at The Access Group we like to host face-to-face events so our customers including Dundee City Council can learn about the enhancements we are making to our software following their feedback to improve their workflows further. The video below explains what Jackie Hall thinks about the importance of face-to-face events.

Future:

Since working with Dundee City Council it has been great to see their services become more streamlined to deliver better care outcomes to the residents in their local community.

We cannot wait to continue our work with Dundee City Council and onboard further projects they are working on to improve the quality of care they deliver.

For more information in what our Access Mosaic  and Access CM software can offer your local community download our guide today.

Discover our latest enhancements and see how they can help reduce the number of administrative tasks, save you time, and most importantly help deliver more person-centred care across your community. 

Contact us today and let’s get the conversation started on how we can help your community be better prepared both now and in the future to deliver better quality care that encourages independence but also offers more hands-on support when care needs change.