Expanding your services with the help of home care software
According to a recent survey by the Centre for Aging Better, in around 10 years, approximately 22% of the population in England (almost 13 million people) will be aged 65 or over. Due to this, the Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) predicts that 57 percent more adults aged 65 and over in England will require care in 2038 compared to 2018.
Fundamentally, in years to come, demand for social care is expected to grow significantly.
To cater for the ever-growing needs of diverse care recipients, some home care agencies are already finding that they need to provide an array of different services. From standard personal care to companionship, cleaning, and end-of-life care – many of our clients are also exploring service offerings like extra care, live-in care, shared lives and respite home care.
Offering flexibility to the way you schedule home care
To provide a more responsive, holistic service to clients, whilst meeting the needs of contractual obligations – IQ:caremanager offers home care businesses an array of scheduling features to cater to every kind of visit type to ensure a responsive and caring service.
Simplifying the scheduling process with Recurring Visits
The bread and butter of visit planning in IQ:caremanager – Recurring Visits allows you to set a series of repeating visits for clients with the same carers in regular patterns (such as daily, weekly or monthly – or any non-standard recurrence that works for you). In practice this lets you schedule visits for clients indefinitely – meaning you can spend less time working on schedules and inputting the same data over and over every week.
Ensuring consistent, cohesive rotas with Regular Carers
Regular Carers is the tool that allows you to allocate preferred carers to Recurring Visits described above. In simple terms, it assigns a specific carer to the pattern of visits you create. But it also provides huge flexibility to ensure that you can schedule different Regular Carers to attend visits on different days, or alternate them on daily, weekly or monthly patterns. Not only can this help reduce the amount of time dedicated to scheduling visits, but can also ensure variety for clients and respite to carers.
Building shift plans with Rounds
For businesses that want to automate shift patterns, the Rounds feature (sometimes referred to as Runs by some care agencies) is a helpful way of grouping a sequence of Recurring Visits on any given day into a logical schedule for a Regular Carer to attend.
This is useful for home care agencies that want to plan a consistent day of visits in a consistent order. Visits can be grouped by geographical location – so that a carer can lessen the distance they travel. Or, visits can be grouped by type – such as visits that all require lifting, or grouping visits to clients that all require a female carer.
Expanding your service offering with Group Activities
Group Activities is a feature that allows you to create scheduled events that can be attended by multiple clients and carers.
It is a useful tool for organising and coordinating activities, social events or classes at a specified location e.g. weekly bingo at a community hall. But can be deployed in Extra Care scenarios such as a lunch period with different carers supervising, setting up and cleaning, and which clients can attend at a time of their choice.
In practice, the Group Activities tool gives multiple carers the ability to log notes against any client at any time during that time window on their mobile app, which means that all carers can record notes and share the responsibility of care for all clients involved.
It also lets you schedule carers to cover Group Activities at different times – allowing you to have carers come and go as they need, whilst getting paid accurately for the timeframe they have attended.
As care agencies grow and develop innovative ways to cater for larger groups of similar clients, Group Activities have become a popular way of utilising resources more effectively. Some businesses are using the tool to schedule waking or sleeping night services e.g. to provide care cover within a residential setting where a carer might need to log notes or clock into a specific client if they have a disturbed night.