Vibrance Care

Vibrance Care provides a wide range of social care and support services at a community level to vulnerable adults throughout Essex and parts of East and South London. This includes residential care homes and supported living along with respite, day, outreach, domiciliary, support planning and self-directed support services.

The Challenge

Vibrance was looking for a rota management system that would help reduce administrative demands,increase the amount of time staff spend directly supporting clients and ultimately ensure better care service provision. In particular, this would cover a team of remote workers responsible for delivering a range of community-based outreach and day services, including regular and reliable one-to-one support in a range of activities in the home and community. Therefore, it needed an effective means to reduce overheads, streamline reporting processes and effectively monitor remote workers.

The Solution

Vibrance selected SmartTask Care because it offered more than just a rota management system including the ability to communicate essential information to staff working remotely and monitor service delivery. The call monitoring solution, using the latest Near Field Communication (NFC) attendance technology installed on a mobile phone, was initially adopted for a team of 15 outreach workers that are supporting over 50 end users located across Redbridge, Waltham Forest and Newham.

The organisation previously employed a full-time administrator that was responsible for manually collating rotas and attendance data using excel spreadsheets and paper-based timesheets. This solution was not only costly in terms of staff time, but also relied on outreach workers accurately completing the timesheets and getting them verified by clients.

SmartTask Care delivered improved rota management to better coordinate the outreach team, while providing automated, electronic timesheets to support invoicing. By automating the manual processes, Vibrance been able to reduce administration time by 15 per cent equating to an annual saving of £30,000. In addition, the organisation has been able to track service provision to ensure that staff are meeting the needs identified in individual support plans by capturing evidence such as signature and location.

The outreach workers can now also access up-to-date care plans and the exact client information via their mobile phone, which has minimised the amount of travel to and from Vibrance’s office. This combined with a reduction in the time completing and requesting the authorisation of timesheets, means they are able to spend more time directly supporting the people they are working with.

Not only has SmartTask Care provided enhanced communication between remote staff and office-based administrators and managers, but also between the organisation’s service, its end users and their circle of support. As a result, clients and their families receive peace of mind that they are receiving and paying for support that is aligned to individual targeted outcomes. This includes an email summary that is sent within minutes of any activity taking place.

Following the successful implementation of SmartTask Care for the outreach service, Vibrance will evaluate what other areas of its operation may benefit from use of the system. The organisation is also looking to align the use of SmartTask Care with a cloud-based document collaboration tool to enable online communication diaries for each service user.

"We are increasingly receiving requests for electronic monitoring and recording, so the adoption of SmartTask Care demonstrates our commitment to innovation and responsiveness to the requirements of our clients, commissioners and staff. Furthermore, it has achieved measurable benefits in terms of cost and time savings, which is contributing to improvements to our service delivery". Richard Cross, Head of Finance, Vibrance

Benefits

• Better care provision to clients for community-based outreach and day services
• 15 per cent reduction in admin time by automating manual processes
• £30,000 annual cost saving by streamlining rota management and proof of service
• Added support to clients and peace of mind to their families
• More time spent on client well-being instead of paperwork