Sun Healthcare specialises in nursing, residential care homes and community support services in the Midlands and Northern England. Supporting adults with learning or physical disabilities,
mental health needs,autism, elderly people and those with dementia, they aim to provide personal & flexible support for people of all abilities.
Highlights
With a large and diverse community of service users, Sun Healthcare found the process of filling gaps in their rota with temporary staff labour-intensive and a massive drain on their time.
“It’s not just about picking up the phone and making one call, what you ended up doing was ringing numerous agencies to put shifts out, even if that’s one shift or multiple shifts.”
Justine Pearce,
Community Service Manager.
“Then you’re waiting for all those agencies to come back to you and if you then get that shift covered in the meantime, you then have to ring those agencies back. It was a huge task. As I say, very labour intensive and not a good use of anyone’s time” explained Justine
Another pain point was agency management in general, juggling the many different agency relationships, fees, and the limited number of agencies they were able to manage.
Sun Healthcare also wanted to make sure that they would be able to get continuity with the temporary staff they worked with and to make sure in advance that all staff were fully qualified and compliant for their assigned duties, rather than waiting for Agencies to supply confirmation only after weeks of requests.
After understanding the issues that Sun Healthcare were experiencing, we realised that these were pain points experienced by Care Providers all over the UK, and ones we had solved for many others in the past. Bringing them onto the Care Hires platform meant that they were able to find pre-vetted temporary staff in just a few minutes, people with confirmed qualifications and legal checks, all at a single flat-rate fee. Overall we calculated that were able to save Sun Healthcare around 40% of their agency budget on rate renegotiations alone.
Staff who worked well with the Sun Healthcare team and their service users could be specifically requested and invited to new shifts, giving the level of continuity they were seeking. Although there were concerns from some staff about learning to use a new system after some training key advocates in the organisation like Justine were keen to bring their colleagues on board:
“That’s how I’ve sold it to my staff in turn, that if I can use it, anyone can! it’s a really visual system as well and I like visual things. To actually book a job on the system is as easy as I was promised”
Using the Care Hires platform, the Sun Healthcare team was able to save in excess of 100 hours per week just on booking workers, based on their bookings team each saving an average of an hour per day; with 20 seniors on the team all calling different agencies to find staff, especially during the busy winter months. The saved hours add up and result in much better productivity overall.
40% reduction in temp agency usage
Estimated to save in excess of £528,000 a year
Leading the change in Frontline Staff Management
