Reduce-Costs-of-Running-Your-Home-Care-Business-Actions-Managers-Can-Take-Today-FINAL

www.icarehealth.co.uk
solutions@icarehealth.co.uk
01440 766400
iCareHealth Business Resources
iCareHealth
Actions Managers Can
Take Today
Your Social Care Business Resource
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REDUCE COSTS OF RUNNING YOUR HOME CARE BUSINESS

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Table of Contents
Mileage Calculations: Up to 25% of business travellers round up their mileage
Paper Time Sheets: Getting this process right will save you thousands
Better Recruitment and Retention: 24% staff turnover is costing the Care Sector
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2
3
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
Inefficiencies and Time Wasters: Waiting times due to gaps in information4 Page 7
Home Office Communication: Move to instant messaging solutions5 Page 8
How to Avoid Agency Costs: And the high hourly rates that go with them6 Page 8
Time & Attendance: Regain control8 Page 9
Optimise your Worker Pool: Add a new revenue stream7 Page 9
Processes and People: Have a good drill-down of your processes9 Page 10
Maintain Competency and Compliance: Getting ‘Caught Out’ will cost you10 Page 11
A Practical Cost Savings Guide from the daily experiences and proven successes of
Domiciliary Care Managers.

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Your Social Care Business ResourceReduce Costs of Running Your Home
Care Business
Actions Managers Can Take Today
With the National Living Wage regulations now in
place, Home and Domiciliary Care companies need
to make sure they’re managing workers’ hours and
staffing expenses efficiently.
In the following paper, Geraint Thomas, Social Care
Software Specialist at iCareHealth, outlines key
practices Care Managers and Owners can implement
to start improving the way they run their businesses.
Of course carers deserve all the money they earn,
and expenses matter to them. But capturing mileage
manually on a timesheet or mileage form is
laborious, and it’s often done hurriedly. It’s also
human nature to round up the figures captured, so
say 1.91 miles become 2.0 miles. In this example,
the round up is 0.09 of a mile. A small value, except
that when it’s multiplied over time, for example: 0.09
miles per visit, 7 visits a day, 5 days a week, for say
30 carers, that ‘small’ value expands into 94.5 miles
a week, or 4,914 miles a year.
Automating mileage calculations removes this
rounding effect. It also removes the admin time and
costs of completing, checking and documenting
mileage forms.
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1 Mileage Calculations
Up to 25% of business travellers round up their mileage claims
Example:
0.09 Miles x
7 visits a day X
5 days a week x
30 care workers =
miles of over
charging a year!

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Have you ever sat down and worked out the
administrative costs associated with using paper time
sheets? There is the obvious list of expenses: paper,
ink cartridges, envelopes, stamps. But add to that the
time taken to put letters in envelopes, the space a
printer can take up in an office, dealing with errors
and out of date information that shows up just as you
commit to post, and the costs mount up.
Overpayment
Re-keying costs
Notifying late filers
Paper, Printing
Packing & Postage
Loss of productivity
Increased overtime
Delivering timesheet
Cost of human errors
Cost of non-compliance
By contrast, a paperless office saves space, money
and time. One of our clients, an 800-carer
organisation, actually saved £250k per annum just
by emailing staff rotas.
2 Paper Time Sheets
Manual Time Sheet
Costs
With a mobile solution, time sheets and visit
information are accessed directly through the
handset. By eliminating the need for care workers to
carry a paper time sheet, head office can significantly
and instantly reduce printing costs.
Take the following example:
Example:
40 workers x 25 visits = 1000 visits per week
Average number of pages per time sheet =
4 x 40 workers = 160 prints per week
160 prints per week x 52 weeks of the year
= 8320 prints per year
Emailing rotas can save you thousands of pounds a year

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At a minimum, this figure could double based on
reprints as visits change. The cost associated with
this number of prints (both paper and ink) can result
in significant savings for an organisation when
adopting a mobile solution. If we take this one step
further and look at the cost of sending out schedules,
the following saving can be achieved:
2
Paper Time Sheets
Example:
40 workers x 25 visits = 40 rotas per week x 64p first class stamp = £24.80 per week
£24.80 x 52 weeks of the year = £1289.60 – just in stamps!
Postage costs alone can add up to thousands of pounds a year
3 Better Recruitment and Retention
Carers wanted! Competitive rates of pay.
Work to suit any hours.“
That’s what any average carer recruitment advert
might say.
However, In the ultra-competitive carer recruitment
market, you need to be able to attract the carers with
the best skills and know-how.
Up to 24% staff turnover is costing the Care Sector

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3
Better Recruitment and Retention
How much better it is to state:
.
Technology is a great way of motivating job hunters
without committing to higher hourly rates. The benefit
to the company is that there are no missed visits, and
schedules are updated automatically, meaning better
compliance and more across-the-board savings.
Staff satisfaction can significantly impact staff
retention. Research commissioned by Skills for
Care calculated the average staff turnover in the
social care sector to be at 24%, with some
organisations experiencing even higher rates.
Mobile software can generate an enormous uplift in
staff satisfaction, not only from the intuitive features of
the software but also from the change in the
organisation workflows. If we take the time sheet
example, mobile time sheets allow care workers to
access their time sheets using the mobile device. This
means care workers no longer have to come into the
office to pick up, and drop off time sheets, which is
often a time consuming and tedious task.
Our Carers get a mobile phone and no timesheets to
fill in! Come and work for a company that values you,
and not your paperwork!
.
“
”

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Pay Day The process for payment is more efficient
as it is no longer reliant on all care workers
delivering their weekly time sheets to the office.
Ensuring care workers receive payment on time
further contributes to staff satisfaction and
decreases unnecessary stress that can come with
delayed payment. Secondary to this, when recruiting
new staff, advertising that your organisation has
paperless time sheets has shown a significant surge
in job applications for our clients.
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Better Recruitment and Retention
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Inefficiencies and Time Wasters
KeySafe Code
Wrong Address
Risk Requirements
Wait to be Accompanied
Last Minute Cover
Hospital Prior to Visit
In an ideal situation the sun is shining, a carer
reaches into her bag for her work mobile and calls
the office. The office answers immediately and gives
the correct code. In reality however the heavens are
open, and the carer has to use her own phone to
call the office. If the office doesn’t answer straight
away she leaves a message and sits in her car
waiting - all lost time a care worker may or may not
be paid for and for which the office may or may not
be charged.
The solution? A mobile device using a safe system
securely displays the code while the carer is in front
of the Keysafe. By providing Keysafe numbers
electronically to carers and office staff your business
saves time, effort and expense.
Time delays when information is not at your finger tips.

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.
5 Home Office Communication
Reduce your mobile phone costs – stop texting
Running a Home Care Business is all about
communication. You are coordinating and matching
the needs of your service users to the availability
and skills of your staff. It’s a process that’s
constantly changing. And changes are often
communicated via phone if they’re last minute, or by
email/post-it note if it can wait. This takes the time of
both office staff and carers.
A Skype-style instant message solution is ideally
suited to the care sector. Since workers all carry
phones, messages are instant and stand out like
texts, but without the associated cost. All
communication is audited and is ultimately much
quicker than phoning and leaving messages.
.
6 How to Avoid Agency Costs
Agency workers can demand up to £30 per hour
The demonisation of zero hour contracts has really
impacted the home care sector. As a consequence,
Home Care companies are reluctant to advertise or
offer them. Such contracts may not offer reliability,
but without them you run the risk of having to fulfil
contracted hours every week. Where there is no
cover available, some organisations rely heavily on
agency workers.
So why not try to have a bank of support workers? If
you had say, ten bank workers as support it may
reduce your dependency on agencies. You could
even offer a higher hourly rate if it reduces your
agency costs.
.
A bank of flexible
workers can be
managed through an
automated system
which enables them to
login and manage their
available hours.
“
”
Use instant messaging
instead of texts.
”
“

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7 Optimise your Worker Pool
Manager your own agency with an automated system
If you have a pool of well managed skilled workers,
can you offer their skills to other organisations?
Your team could give cover to other Home Care
companies in the style of an agency. Or perhaps
you could engage with CCGs and hospitals in your
area to see if they are in need of your team’s
services?
NHS and CCGs are under intense pressure to
reduce costs and work with external companies.
Offer them a working relationship and they may pay
higher hourly rates than social services.
.
.
8 Time & Attendance
Regain control of events that impact your business
There’s been a concerted move by councils to force
the use of monitoring solutions on care
organisations. Electronic Call Monitoring (ECM) is
now widely used, yet it can be frustrating for
organisations and carers. ECM requires a carer to
use a land line, but what if the service user is on the
phone when the carer arrives? The pressure on the
carer when they come into the home is to make that
call instead of engaging with the client.
.
Late Visits
Missed Visits
Early Visits
Under/ Over Length
Improve your
percentages

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ECM is now bedded in the system and some are
finding that the automatic confirmation of attendance
has greatly reduced the effort in confirming
timesheets, because the information is captured
electronically.
However, it’s worth looking at more discrete
attendance solutions like mobile apps using GPS or
tags using NFC (near field communication).
Moving all of your visits to a monitoring solution
should let you eliminate timesheet confirmation
completely. A move to a person-centric NFC system
can be cost-effective.
.
.
8 Time & Attendance
Regain control of events that impact your business
.
9 Processes and People
Take the time to review your processes and people management
Streamlining processes, creating more efficient
rotas and managing changes efficiently and
effectively for carers can be a huge cost savings
because it allows each coordinator to manage more
staff. And the fewer coordinators you need, the
smaller the office space required and the lower the
costs.
To find out whether your processes could be more
efficient, ask for a formal process review with an
iCareHealth consultant.
.
HR
Payroll
Scheduling
Training and Competency
Communications
Key Processes

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10 Maintain Competency Levels
Getting ‘caught out’ can cost you
Every organisation has some sort of training matrix,
usually a mammoth set of columns, all rows and
tabs, brightly highlighted in a plethora of colour
coding. Sounds familiar? This is often used as the
single source of truth for competency expiry dates.
There is often another sheet to show attendance to
courses, and a paper file containing all the
certificates, and/or an eLearning module which
holds the information too.
Instead, having all training records, certificates and
expiries in one place saves time and effort. This
should ideally be linked with the rota to ensure that
expired mandatory training stops carers from
attending visits. Being on top of competency also
avoids any issues when it comes to CQC visits and
ensures quality of care. Chose an automated Home
Care management solution that is able to manage
rotas and competency requirements together.
.

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Quality Person Centric Care Delivery
Mobile solutions allow care workers to access information with greater convenience. The
ability to understand more about the service user’s habits, likes, dislikes and preferences
before they enter the service user’s home can greatly determine the level of
personalised care delivered. The recording of tasks and progress notes on site ensures
information is logged accurately and timely. Better data quality means more informed
decisions and enhanced service user outcomes. This allows the care workers to deliver
more person-centric care, and helps ensure the service users’ needs are continually
assessed and met.
Why you should consider a Mobile Solution
iCareHealth is a leading provider of clinical, medicines and business management
software solutions in the UK, dedicated to providing software solutions to the care industry
in order to maximise efficiencies and make business more profitable.
Our Sector Experts have years of experience working with Social Care businesses like
yours. We’ve created a series of resources to provide insight and tips for running your
business.
If you’d like to speak to one of our experts, just Ask!
icarehealth.co.uk/contact
01440 766 400
About Us
iCareHealth
Weavers Mill
High Street
Haverhill
Suffolk CB9 8DD

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