Calsa Care - Care Home Case Study
About Calsa Care
Vicarage Court Care Home is situated at North Featherstone, Pontefract. It is ideally located between the 5 local towns and just off the M62, making it accessible to Wakefield, Leeds, Bradford, York, etc.
It has idyllic surroundings within beautiful Yorkshire countryside. The Home is on a large 3 acre site, with 2 acres dedicated to a beautiful garden. The Home is close to many local amenities; post office, public house and various shops. There is ample free car parking for visitors at the front of the Home.
Vicarage Court has been a Residential Dementia Home since 1983 and is very established within the local community. In 2014, the home established a general nursing unit and a general residential unit.
The Singh Family are the proprietors of Calsa Care Ltd and the Vicarage Court Care Home and through their daily personal contact ensure that all the residents personal needs are met.
The management team is highly experienced. Helen, the Nurse manager has been a nurse since 1980, and has 3 decades of nursing home management experience. She has worked with residents with extensive nursing needs, brain injuries, complex care and dementia needs.
The Head of Clinical Care is Dorothy. She has had a diverse career working primarily in the NHS as a nurse practitioner and ward manager. In the last 10 years, she has worked in the private sector as a clinical nurse specialist, with young disabled and elderly residents.
This means there is an enormous amount of experience in caring for the elderly and meeting their needs and expectations. Their experience includes residents with Parkinsons, Huntingdons, brain injuries, obesity, diabetes, ventilated patients, epilepsy, dementia, cerebral vascular incidents, and many other areas of care.
The Home has 24 hour RGN cover. It also employs two unit managers for each of the dementia, young physically disabled and residential units, so that senior staff are available at all times. All the Homes staff receive significant on-going training, both mandatory and specialist. Many have formal qualifications such as NVQ’s.
The Home was awarded " Employer of the Year" in 2014 by Wakefield College. The home has consistently been regarded as the top nursing home in Yorkshire according to relatives feedback.
The home is closely involved in a multi-disciplinary team which involves our staff liaising with GPs, district nurses, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, podiatrists, dentists, opticians, hearing aids specialists, and many other care professionals.
The care home motto is
"When excellence becomes tradition, greatness knows no limit."
The Challenge
Operating 24/7 and with 120 employees across eleven departments. They need to schedule more than 2500 hours of work per week, and this represented as much as 65% of their income as a cost. It was therefore essential for them to have control and awareness of who is working, who is able to work, to make sure the right skill mix of staff was on shift keeping the residents safe whilst remaining within budget.
The admin team spent days planning and preparing budgets, printing rosters for staff to take home, scheduling temporary changes, tracking absenteeism and then calculating timesheets. With an expanding facility, it was essential to streamline this process and free up some administrative time.
In addition to rostering, Calsa Care also wanted a system that will help with the following:
Group staff into different teams
Live emailed alerts on no shows, early leaves, lateness and overtime.
Record employees worked hours using fingerprint biometric recognition hardware – to improve accuracy, eliminate buddy clocking and eliminate people forgetting cards or fobs.
Reporting tools and audits on activities and role changes in the business i.e. someone working as a care assistant in the day and as a kitchen assistant in the afternoon. This was in order to track and record different hourly rates for payroll preparation.
Track paid and unpaid breaks at different times in the day.
Prepare employee worked hour data into an exportable csv or excel file, in order to upload into a payroll system or bureau.
Self-Servicing features for employees to provide a digital schedule that is always up to date and accessible from home.
The Solution
Chronicle Online was developed by people with over 30 years combined experience in workforce management. The Chronicle product suite was designed specially to address all the challenges a typical Care or Nursing Home faces.
Chronicle Scheduling helps businesses roster the right people in the right place at the right time.
Chronicle Budgeting tools help manage staffing levels in either hours, headcount or monetary values. Showing you clearly plans vs budgets and actuals vs plans.
Chronicle Biometric terminals provide peace of mind that there is no buddy clocking occurring in a 24/7 environment.
Chronicle Holiday Sick and Absence planning tools enables accurate reporting of incidents, statistics and live information.
Chronicle HR provides an online database of employee’s contracts, appraisals, discipline, history, skills and training records.
Chronicle Self Servicing – provide employees the ability to view rosters, see worked hours, check holiday sick and absence entitlements.
Chronicle Activity and Cost Centre tracking enables people to work different roles and for time to be logged against different areas of the business helping prepare an accurate payroll output.
Chronicle Exports enables business in a click of a button to produce a custom csv file in the correct format to import directly into payroll avoiding inaccuracies, overpaying staff and reducing admin time.
The Process
The implementation process was broken down into three parts.
The Setup and Configuration – Activating the live environment, releasing the URL and username/password. Importing all the employee details, building and defining the working rules, budgets and shift patterns. Setting up all the holiday sick and absence entitlement. Tagging employees to the correct roster, activity and department.
The Installation and Commissioning – Installing the hardware, checking it communicates properly, defining the IP address or DCHP settings and enrolling the employees.
The Training and Bedding IN – Online training for an hour at a time provided remotely over a period of weeks. This helps give the best results and system users the opportunity to absorb the training at a manageable rate.
“Rostering and budgeting in the home is so much easier and with the self-servicing features it means my colleagues can see their roster digitally.”
Helen Thom, Registered Manager Calsa Care
The Technology
Biometric Clocking Terminal Chronicle Online / Self Servicing
In summary, the Chronicle Online product is a great option for privately run businesses to plan and control their staffing levels and wage bill. Utilising the latest cloud based technology it also makes it viable and affordable for businesses with minimal IT infrastructure.
“The Chronicle product lives up to its promise and expectation. The team have provided a fantastic level of support and attention to detail at key moments.”
Gurdip Singh, Managing Director
Calsa Care
About Chronicle Computing
Chronicle Computing was established in to provide small medium and large companies the most functional, robust and affordable Cloud Based Workforce Management System in the UK.
Specialising in Time and Attendance, Access Control, HR and Scheduling Solutions. Chronicle Computing has extensive experience in managing, implementing, configuring, installing and training users on WFM systems.
Chronicle Computing Ltd
Kemp House
160 City Road
London
EC1V 2NX
Telephone: 07401578527
Freephone: 0800 1073284
Email: rupertlassen@chronicle-computing.co.uk
www.chronicle-computing.com
www.chronicle-computing.co.uk
Mission Statement – ‘To provide an affordable, simple and robust web-based workforce management system that users can prepare a payroll run with and extract management information, critical to a successful organisation.’
