Caerphilly County Borough Council saves over £500,000 with OfficeBase and inTOUCH from CACI
Caerphilly County Borough Council (Caerphilly) provides a wide range of social care services into the community, with the Home Assistance Reablement Team supporting service users across a largely rural 173 square mile area.
- (1888PressRelease) December 23, 2011 - The team of over 300 field-based staff, monitoring officers, administrators and IT personnel, is committed to providing an efficient, high quality and cost-effective service.
The challenge
Caerphilly understood that the implementation of a new staff scheduling and call monitoring system would be instrumental is maintaining this commitment and improving outcomes.
Reablement service delivery changes frequently over a short period of time, as client needs change. As such, a new system needed to be flexible to support rapid changes to care planning, as well as providing accurate, but unobtrusive, monitoring of contact time. Support for carers was also a high priority, with the Caerphilly team keen to evaluate how monitoring tools could improve staff safety and communication with co-ordinators.
Caerphilly decided to tender for a new system, seeking a supplier who, whilst mindful of the department's budgetary constraints and procurement rules, could provide the most appropriate technology to move operations forward.
The solution
Caerphilly chose to implement CACI's integrated care provider management software. The solution includes OfficeBase, a scalable web-based client management and staff scheduling product, and inTOUCH monitoring, an award-winning mobile working extension deployed on smart phones and issued to carers.
OfficeBase provides Caerphilly with key functionality around:
• Rapid care package planning and amendment
• Staff roster optimisation
• Automating timesheet automation
• Payroll and client charging
• Customised reports (including inspection information for the Care and Social Services Inspectorate Wales)
The inTOUCH mobile working solution (named 'Dragon' by Caerphilly) provides:
• Dynamic, electronic schedules
• Electronic monitoring of all staff time
• Lone worker safety alerts and alarms
The results and benefits
Caerphilly has realised significant financial and non-financial benefits since going live with the solution. Over £500,000 has been saved in just the first year of usage, even when offset against the system's initial set-up cost.
The service has also experienced a significant increase in efficiency through better use of staff time, where functionality including optimisation of travel times and the visibility of staff utilisation, has led to an overall reduction in staff costs.
Commenting on how staff have found the technology change, Sandra Davies, Training & Development Officer at Caerphilly County Borough Council, said: "Back office staff have adapted to the system very quickly and are pleased with how easy the product is to use. Carers have also become reliant, very quickly, upon their mobile devices to do their jobs.
"Interestingly, the original tender anticipated procuring a landline based call monitoring system. However, the benefits and savings that were possible with a mobile working solution quickly outweighed this and has replaced any need for a landline solution."
Jo Williams, Service Manager, Caerphilly County Borough Council, added: "CACI provided an excellent level of service. The project manager and helpful support staff worked with us to ensure we developed a product that was innovative, tailored to our needs and is over and above what we ever expected."
Going forward, Caerphilly plans to take advantage of the inTOUCH forms module to capture outcomes at the point of care. Future developments also include linking telecare systems and further co-ordination with other departments and health services to better support service integration.
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