East Sussex Joint Community Rehabilitation Service is based out of 3 localities looking after approximately 200 clients at a time, for 6 week reablement programmes. Each locality has 15 back-office staff and the service has approximately 200 Support Workers.

In 2019 they started using a range of technology solutions from HAS Technology including CM Scheduling with MaxCare optimisation, Mileage Wizard, CM Mobile for real-time visit monitoring and CMBI for business intelligence reporting. 

Whilst they had previously used a simple rostering solution, their Support Workers had no access to real-time information about visit schedules. This meant they had to call the office to find out their schedule for the next day (even if they were on a day off or on annual leave). This was extremely frustrating for Support Workers and was regularly mentioned at exit interviews as a reason for leaving, so the team were determined to find a better way which empowered staff with all the information they needed in a rapid, secure manner. They also wanted the visibility of real-time visit monitoring to give them additional transparency of service delivery and ensure no visits were missed.

Johanna Hart, Service Coordinator, explained the 3 key motivating factors for introducing CM’s technology:

1. Give Support Workers their visit schedules electronically in real-time to prevent them having to phone for information and use their own means to record the information manually.

2. To get a more tangible picture of care delivery and allow the service to better manage issues like punctuality and missed visits.

3. Eradicate some of the laborious back office processes.

Empowering Support Workers with real-time information

“Since we implemented CM Mobile Support Workers’ work-life balance has improved. They have all the information on the app on their phone and they no longer have to be thinking about their schedules the day before or spending their time trying to get through to the office by telephone. This has made staff much happier.

“Communication with Support Workers is so much easier now and the availability of the notes recorded against the client record mean that Support Workers are better informed. Previously on arrival Support Workers had to refer to ‘the book’ (care plan) which meant the attention wasn’t immediately on the Client. Now when a Support Worker arrives at a new Client they can be well-prepared about care needs and ready to deliver appropriate support.”

Gaining visibility of care delivery

“We now have complete transparency of our care delivery. There’s been a reduction in missed calls because Support Workers can see all the latest details on the app and it’s easier to reallocate visits if someone is running late so the real-time information allows the service to be more responsive. This has been helpful during the pandemic as we have been managing higher than average staff absences.

“Having the visibility of what is happening in the community is very useful, especially if you need to investigate an issue. For example, we received a complaint to say that visits were taking place at wildly inconsistent times and we were able to interrogate the visit data and see that in fact there had only ever been a 20 minute variation in visit start times. This evidence was helpful in being able to give a measured response to the complaint. Data has also shown when visits were being cut short and allowed remedial action to be taken.

“The CMBI business intelligence reporting is providing the high-level view needed to manage the service whilst allowing us to drill down into individual detail if required. In addition to the standard reports we have found the ability to develop bespoke reports very useful.”

Improving back office efficiency

“The technology has helped us improve our back-office efficiency in a number of ways. There has been a huge reduction in telephone calls between the office and Support Workers. The administration time saved will eventually equate to 3 full time equivalent roles. This will allow the service to use people’s time for different things and introduce more flexible working which wasn’t practical before. 

“The introduction of Mileage Wizard has removed the need for Support Workers to make mileage claims. The information goes straight to payroll, automating what was a time-consuming manual process.

“Having used a roster system before we were familiar with the benefits they bring in allowing you to make the most of your capacity, but one aspect of the CM system we find particularly helpful is the way service stop details are retained in the system allowing you to spot trends.

“The MaxCare optimisation tool groups visits together to minimise travel and frees up the Planners’ time to look at new referrals on the basis of available Support Workers.

“The flexibility of the system has allowed us to use it to schedule Support Work vaccinations – even taking into account travel to and from the vaccination centre.  We’ve also found the note functionality helpful for sharing Covid information related to Clients and Support Workers to keep all relevant parties informed. It has also proved useful for tracking PPE information (who has been issued with what) which is reported on using CMBI.”  

Bringing robust audit trails and extra reassurance to medication management

East Sussex were part of a pilot group using CM’s eMAR solution through its final development phase. Johanna explains:

“We took the opportunity to get involved in piloting the eMAR solution as we see medication management as our biggest area of risk. Because of the nature of our reablement service, medication management isn’t a day-to-day occurrence so it’s especially important to have a robust audit trail and systems in place to identify any errors quickly. CM’s eMAR gives us visibility we simply didn’t have before.

“Each of our localities has a Medication Lead and eMAR has made auditing medication management much easier. They were previously very remote from the actual activity but being empowered with real-time information brings added security and reassurance for all parties. If a Client was just getting one visit a day and medication was missed it could be the next visit 24 hours later before anyone picked up on it. Now if medication was missed it would be easy to identify a Support Worker nearby who could go and rectify the situation.

“The Support Workers in our pilot group were really impressed. They especially liked the body map showing where to apply creams or patches as it made it very clear what was required and minimised the risk of mistakes.”

Johanna concludes “My role is about delivering continuous improvement and to do that you need to utilise technology. I have received great support from the team at CM and implementing these care management solutions has enabled us to achieve improved communication with Support Workers, delivered valuable oversight of our service and allowed us to improve the efficiency of our back office.  All of these things contribute to delivering quality care to our Clients.”