34
Alina Homecare branches using Birdie
650
Alina Homecare care professionals on Birdie
Find out why Alina Homecare consistently feature among top 20 homecare businesses in the UK
About Alina Homecare
Alina Homecare is an award winning private domiciliary care provider with a growing number of branch locations across the south of England. They provide support to older adults and adults of all ages with disabilities, funded by both private individuals and local authorities.
They focus on delivering an exceptionally high quality level of care to all their clients. This has been recognised by leading elderly home care review website homecare.co.uk after awarding Alina Homecare the prestigious Top Home Care Group in 2021 and 2022.
The challenge
The Alina Homecare team are passionate about providing the highest standard of quality and professional care to all their clients. With an extensive and growing number of elderly clients Alina Homecare was looking to secure a scalable and innovative way of consistently delivering their quality recognised care.
However the social care, paper-based approach to care management they initially used was not fit for purpose and was starting to make this delivery of care more of a challenge than necessary. MAR charts, care logs and notes were hand written on paper and stored in the client’s home - which was costly in terms of printing, office staff time, and drop-off and collection by team members. It also meant it was extremely challenging for Alina Homecare to compare branch performance and quickly audit best practices across the organisation. Any concerns regarding clients had to be raised manually with a call to the office, and if a care recipient’s family members wanted to be updated on the care that their loved one was receiving, this too involved a call to or from the office.
The solution
There was a strong drive to maintain a consistent way of working across the rapidly expanding branch network. Given all of these challenges, Alina Homecare began looking for a single platform that could digitise their paper processes, allow carers to check in and out of calls quickly and easily, and create more transparency across the organisation.
With an ambitious growth plan, it was also critical for Alina Homecare that their technology partner would enable new branch locations to quickly establish themselves and deliver the high quality person-centred care that is a hallmark of their business.
The whole ethos of Alina Homecare is around quality of care - very, very high quality - and an almost evangelical focus on quality of care. At the same time we look after our care workers and our support workers to make sure that they have a really engaging environment in which they can operate.
How they did it
Alina Homecare took the decision to partner with Birdie and implement their care management platform; and started to see the desired changes as the solution was rolled out across their branch network.
Using Birdie’s care management app, carers were now able to record tasks and care logs digitally, saving them time and removing the need to transport paper logs to and from the branch. The branches also benefited from much greater visibility of each care visit, seeing the information in real-time, so they could take the relevant action as and when needed.
Alina Homecare adopted Birdie’s database of tasks to quickly create task lists, but with the ability to create unique client notes associated with each task, so carers knew exactly what to do for each client.
The challenge of comparing the performance of branches across their large network was also an issue, but they were able to address this with Birdie’s ‘Q score’ - short for Quality Score. The Q score is designed to measure how an individual branch is performing, taking into account care planning, delivery, responsiveness, staff and medication, and is designed to help providers excel in the areas assessed by the CQC.
For example, taking a carer who just works through their tasks and ticks them off and then making sure that they’re adding notes is not a direct correlation to reaching an ‘outstanding’ rating, but as Alina Homecare found, giving full, person-centred detail is what the Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspections are looking for.
As Alina Homecare Commercial Director Jo Dumville commented “the more relevant detail we have in our care plans and logs, the better for our clients, their families, and for us. It drives continuous development and improvement and reflects our ‘Outstanding’ and ‘Good CQC results.”
It (Birdie) is the best thing ever. It really has made a huge difference!
Alina Homecare growing and thriving with a technology partner
Alina Homecare are able to deliver the highest standards of elderly care across their growing network. Their home care team are feeling more motivated than ever, secure in the knowledge that they can deliver outstanding person-centred care and keep track of their clients needs without endless paperwork, phone calls or reams of paper. The office teams are able to use the Birdie office hub to get an overview of not just care delivered, but also to track their efficiency as they grow.
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