The Care Quality Commission’s single assessment framework was introduced with one clear purpose: to raise care standards across the sector. A goal shared by every provider. Delivering this level of change at scale is complex, and while the ambition is right, the transition has brought challenges such as registration delays, inspection backlogs, and increased documentation demands. These issues reflect the size of the task, not a lack of commitment from the regulator. 

The CQC is actively working to address these challenges following independent reviews, but providers still face operational and financial pressures. Understanding these pressures, and planning for them, can help providers stay focused on what matters most – delivering outstanding care. 

Registration delays remain a challenge

Registration delays continue to impact providers as the new framework beds in. For example, CQC performance data shows 54% of pending registration applications exceeded the 10-week target at the end of 2023–24, up from 22% the previous year. Industry reports suggest applications can take up to six months to process. These delays often mean new care homes sit empty and funding is held back until registration is confirmed, adding pressure for providers and the regulator alike.

While the CQC’s intention is never to stifle care capacity nor quality, these delays highlight the challenge of balancing rigorous standards with the urgent need to bring new services online.

Re-inspection backlogs create prolonged uncertainty

Inspection backlogs add further complexity. According to the Homecare Association, 70.3% of community social care providers either have never been rated or have ratings that are 4–8+ years old, up from 60% in August 2024.

The average wait for re-inspection after a ‘requires improvement’ rating is now 360 days — a 153% increase since 2015. For homecare, uninspected locations rose 64% in 14 months between June 2024 and August 2025 from 2,879 to 4,727. At current inspection rates, the backlog will continue to grow.

These delays have real consequences for providers, but they also affect care seekers and commissioners who depend on current ratings to make confident, informed choices. When ratings are outdated or missing, it can restrict options and make decisions harder. Which is clearly something the CQC is committed to improving through transparency and timely assessments. At the same time, these challenges underline the scale of the task facing the CQC as it works to deliver a more consistent, modern regulatory approach.

Framework complexity reflects ambition

The single assessment framework introduced significant complexity, requiring structured approaches to evidence and documentation. Independent reviews have highlighted these challenges.

Professor Sir Mike Richards’ review stated the framework “is far too complex and, as currently constituted, does not allow for the huge differences in the size, complexity and range of functions of the services that CQC regulates.” Initially, the framework required six evidence types for each quality statement, up to 204 evaluation points, though this was simplified in December 2024.

Even with revisions, compliance remains demanding. This reflects the CQC’s ambition to raise standards and drive best practice across the sector. While the process can feel challenging for providers, the intention is not to penalise or create unnecessary burden, the ultimate goal is to ensure safer, higher-quality care for the people who rely on these services. Providers therefore need systematic ways to organise evidence and maintain audit trails to align with this shared mission.

Understanding the broader impact

While £50,000 is the maximum penalty for compliance failures, the bigger challenge lies in maintaining standards amid reduced inspections and extended delays. Inspections have fallen sharply from around 16,000 in 2019/20 to approximately 6,700 in 2023/24, making progress harder to evidence.

Financial impact goes beyond fines: in the residential care home sector, Knight Frank research shows that inadequate-rated homes operate at profit margins of around 22%, compared with 34% for outstanding-rated homes – a significant disparity that compounds over time. Occupancy rates also drop when ratings remain outdated, as families and commissioners seek higher-rated alternatives.

In a competitive market, this new framework can ultimately have a positive impact by creating more robust standards and building trust among care seekers. It also provides a clearer roadmap for providers needing improvement, helping them demonstrate progress and raise their potential over time. While it may not feel that way pre- or post-audit, the intention is to lift quality across the sector. These pressures highlight why proactive compliance planning is essential, not just for providers’ commercial stability, but to support the shared goal of improving care quality.

Regulatory improvements underway

The CQC acknowledges these challenges and is implementing improvements following reviews by Dr Penny Dash and Professor Sir Mike Richards. These include stabilising its regulatory platform, upgrading the provider portal, and refining processes to make compliance smoother.

Dr Dash emphasised that effective regulation “can identify failings in the delivery of care and assist providers in making improvements,” while Richards recommended a fundamental reset, noting success depends on recruiting and training sufficient inspection staff with sector expertise.

These steps will help, but the single assessment framework, with its 34 quality statements and comprehensive evidence requirements, remains central to compliance. Providers will still need robust systems to organise evidence, track compliance, and maintain audit trails.

How Certa supports providers through regulatory complexity

Certa helps providers turn compliance challenges into manageable processes:

Streamlined evidence preparation: Generate comprehensive inspection-ready reports quickly, reducing stress and saving time.

Real-time compliance monitoring: Track essential checks like DBS, right-to-work, and care plan reviews, with alerts to prevent non-compliance.

Communication logs: Capture compliments, complaints, and key interactions with full audit trails for inspection evidence.

Advanced medication management: Electronic MAR integrated with NHS Medicines API ensures accuracy and visibility, with alerts for missed doses.

Conclusion

Beyond compliance, Certa gives providers a competitive edge. By combining regulatory tools with care planning, scheduling, and family engagement in one platform, Certa helps providers stay compliant, protect revenue, and deliver exceptional experiences that set them apart in a crowded market. Regulatory complexity doesn’t have to be a barrier – with the right systems, providers can focus on what matters most: outstanding care.

Discover how Certa can enhance your regulatory readiness and operational excellence at: www.caci.co.uk/software/certa

The care sector is under immense pressure: staff shortages, rising demand and tighter compliance standards have created a perfect storm for providers. In response, many care management software vendors are racing to add artificial intelligence (AI) features, promising smarter decisions, predictive insights and faster outcomes. 

Is outsourcing thinking to algorithms really the answer though? Or does it risk eroding the very foundation of care – trust, safety, and human connection? 

Why the AI rush in care management software?

AI isn’t just a buzzword. It’s being embedded into care management software in ways that sound transformative: 

• Automatically building care plans by analysing assessments, medical history and wearable data 

• Predicting risks such as falls or hospital readmissions before they happen 

• Optimising rosters by matching carers to clients based on skills, continuity and location 

• Summarising notes and ensuring compliance using natural language processing 

For care providers under pressure to cut admin, stay compliant and deliver person-centred care, these promises are compelling. The narrative is clear: AI will save time, improve outcomes and reduce costs. 

In reality, however, AI in care is still unproven, often opaque and can introduce risks if adopted without clear guardrails. Algorithms are only as good as the data they’re trained on, and in social care, data can be fragmented, inconsistent and context-dependent. When decisions about vulnerable people are delegated to black-box systems, the consequences can be serious: misaligned workflows, compliance gaps and even mistrust among staff and clients. 

The risks of overreliance on AI in care management software 

AI isn’t magic. It’s a set of algorithms trained on data, and in care, that data often comes from fragmented systems, inconsistent records and human interpretation. When decisions about vulnerable people are delegated to unproven tools, the risks multiply: 

Unproven technology

• Many AI features in care software are still in early stages. Without rigorous testing in real-world settings, outputs can be unreliable, workflows misaligned and operational complexity increased. Care plans built by algorithms may look efficient, but do they truly reflect the individual behind the data? 

Compliance gaps 

• Regulators like the Care Quality Commission (CQC) emphasise person-centred documentation, accountability and evidence-based decision-making. If AI decisions can’t be explained or audited, providers could face compliance risks. Person-centred care isn’t just a phrase, it’s a legal and ethical requirement that demands human oversight. 

Staff pushback 

• Care is a human profession. Tools that feel impersonal or difficult to use can create mistrust, lower morale and cause resistance. Technology should empower staff, not alienate them. When carers feel sidelined by algorithms, the essence of care is lost. 

Client experience 

• Person-centred care is the cornerstone of quality ratings and client satisfaction. Poorly implemented AI can create barriers between carers and clients, undermining trust and connection. A truly person-centred approach means listening, adapting and responding in real time, something no algorithm can fully replicate. 

The missing human element

• Care isn’t just about tasks; it’s about empathy, intuition and the ability to respond to subtle cues. Experienced carers bring a rich, dynamic understanding shaped by years of hands-on work – something no dataset can capture. Compassion is a uniquely human trait. AI can process information, but it cannot care. 

Automation: The smarter alternative

Instead of chasing hype, CACI believes in automation with accountability – care management software that streamlines admin, reduces errors and frees staff to focus on what matters most: caring for clients. 

Automation works within parameters set by the provider, ensuring transparency and control. It’s innovation without compromise. 

Efficiency without risk 

• Automated rostering, travel time optimisation and digital care planning reduce admin burden without replacing professional judgment, keeping the person at the centre of every decision.

Compliance built in 

• Automation ensures accurate records, audit trails and SAF-aligned reporting – critical for inspections and quality assurance. Providers stay in control, not algorithms.

Human-centric design

•  By removing repetitive tasks, automation gives carers more time for meaningful interactions with clients. Technology should support the relationship between carer and client, not replace it. Person-centred care needs a person. 

Our approach with Certa 

At CACI, we’ve built Certa, our care management software, around three guiding principles: 

Connecting 

• Bringing people, data and processes together seamlessly. Everyone works from the same trusted source, whether in the office or in the field.

Confirming 

• Compliance, accuracy and transparency are non-negotiable. Certa helps providers evidence quality standards with ease.

Caring 

• Technology should never replace empathy. Certa empowers staff to focus on the human side of care. 

From smart rostering and travel optimisation to digital care planning and real-time reporting, Certa automates the complex while preserving the human touch. 

Where does AI get in? 

AI isn’t the enemy. It has a role, but only when it enhances, not replaces, person-centred care. Predictive analytics, for example, can help identify trends in service demand or flag potential compliance risks. However, these tools must be transparent, tested and always under provider control. 

The safest path is a measured one: 

• Adopt technology that grows with your service 

• Keep compliance front and centre 

• Strengthen relationships between carers and clients 

That’s what Certa delivers. 

The bottom line 

The best care management software combines innovation with empathy. It automates the complex, supports compliance and preserves the human connection that defines quality care. 

AI may be part of the future, but rushing in without a clear strategy can lead to wasted investment, unhappy staff and compromised care. A balanced approach will make all the difference. 

Why Certa makes a difference

Certa is designed for care providers who want technology that works for them. Not the other way around. With features like: 

• Person-centred care planning 

• Advanced rostering and travel optimisation 

• Real-time reporting and SAF-aligned compliance tools 

• Secure-by-design architecture (ISO27001, Cyber Essentials Plus) 

Certa helps you deliver outstanding care while staying efficient, compliant and connected. Get in touch with us today to find out how automation can help your staff focus on what matters most: providing care. 

You might explore home care software based on a specific pain point or set of needs. But what else are you missing out on? Our blog explores. 

Many home care providers select their home care software based on a specific need. It might be a need to implement a friends and family portal, digitise their services or more efficiently handle financial management. But home care software can carry a multitude of benefits to home care providers. Whilst addressing specific needs is important, taking a step back and considering the while picture can result in tangible benefits being delivered across your care services. This blog will examine the top 7 features you should look for when examining home care software solutions. 

What is home care software? 

To begin with, what is home care software? It’s the software that should support every area of your home care delivery. Where client records were recorded and stored on paper, home care software makes the process digital. This makes your services more agile, with the ability to record information on the go, interact with care workers and their schedules, create friends and family portals for your clients and record and share data easily. 

Why do I need home care software? 

Home care software can deliver a multitude of benefits to your home care services. Perhaps most importantly, however, your clients expect a modern service. Being able to offer outward facing services such as a friends and family portal, updated with real-time information, helps to reassures your clients and their loved ones. 

No less important is the consideration of data security. Our previous blog explored the topic of cyber security for home care providers. In short, keeping the data process safe is important from a GDPR and CQC inspection standpoint.  

Not only does the CQC want evidence that you’re processing and storing data safely in line with its data security and protection toolkit, but the regulator will also need straightforward access to your data to perform inspections. Being able to easily generate accurate and up-to-date reports from your data is something home care software can support. 

What if I don’t need a home care software solution? 

Home care software is an important consideration as your business grows. If you’re only caring for a small number of clients with a small number of care workers to manage, then the outlay might not make sense for your business. 

As your business grows, however, the complexity of your operation will grow with it. With more clients, more carers and more considerations, it becomes increasingly unmanageable where you rely on manual ways of working. Staying on top of finances, client needs, scheduling, reporting and maintaining an outstanding level of care provision can quickly become overwhelming. Home care software can help you by automating swathes of your business, supporting effective communication and the ongoing delivery of outstanding care. 

What you need from a home care software solution 

1. Care planning 

From onboarding clients into your services to being agile in the face of their shifting needs, your home care software solution should support you in creating, revising and delivering person-centred care plans bespoke to the needs of each client. Being adaptable is key. Demands can change in an instant, so your service needs to be responsive. Your carers also need up-to-date information on each client, ensuring they deliver the right care at the right time, 

2. Scheduling your care workers 

Once your care plans are established, you need to schedule care workers to deliver them. Home care management software can remove much of the guesswork in scheduling, helping you to respond instantly to short-term changes. This keeps your services on track, makes the most efficient use of your resources and delivers your care plans in the most effective way. From matching the needs of the client to the skills and experience of the care worker, home care software can support you in delivering continuity of care by ensuring that the right people are in the right place at the right time. 

3. Record information and communicate in real time 

A good home care software solution should provide you with a care worker app. This can be easily downloaded onto the carer’s mobile device and used to complete care visits. As well as equipping your carers with vital context and information on each visit, a care worker app should further support lone worker safety and provide real-time information back to the office. This supports care workers in going about their tasks with confidence, whilst also supporting them in capturing and recording outcomes as they go, removing the need to write up notes and manual data entry. 

4. Complete financial management 

Having confidence that your care worker pay and funder billing are accurate is essential to the financial health of your home care service. By linking to your care plans and care worker schedules, understanding what has been delivered, home care software can support you in maintaining accurate records of who has done what, when. You can further create timesheets for your care workers, making it easy and accurate for them to log care visits and any travel expenses incurred. By automating much of the process, home care software can reduce friction and human error in your financial management. 

5. Create reports on your care services easily 

Being able to easily and accurately report on your home care services provides valuable insights on your business. It’s also important for CQC inspections, not least as the first stage of most inspections will be virtual. A good home care software system should provide your service with bespoke dashboards for each user, enabling them to interact with the information they need. When you need insights, they should be easy to obtain from the data you hold across your care services. 

6. Friends and family portal 

Communicating with your clients and their loved ones is an important and reassuring aspect of modern care delivery. By linking to your care plans and schedules, care software systems can create bespoke, real-time portals through which your clients and their loved ones can see the schedule of their care visits, care due to be administered and care administered.  

7. Support, security and compliance 

It’s important to consider the team behind your home care software solution. What security certificates do they possess? What ongoing support will you receive with the software? What’s the system uptime availability? How will your data be handled? Given the importance of selecting the right home care software solution, it’s imperative to consider the whole package and select a partner that can support the needs of your business. 

How Certa from CACI can support your care service 

Certa from CACI is a complete home care management software solution designed to support every facet of care delivery. Whatever support you need in enhancing the delivery of your care services, Certa can help. 

Delivering tangible benefits to homecare services by making compliance, consent, auditing, reporting and care plan provision straightforward and streamlined, what difference can Certa make to your homecare services? 

You can find out more by booking a no-obligation demo of Certa today. 

If you’re facing tightening budgets and an increased demand for efficiency, understanding the specifics of how your care service runs is essential. If you’re facing the scrutiny of a CQC inspection, understanding and being able to portray how your care service runs is also essential. Modern systems play a fundamental role in supporting care services to achieve these aims. From acting as a central database to helping software users collate and interrogate the data they need, having the right care management software in place can make reporting and your CQC inspection that much easier.

Displaying accurate data depends upon accurate data capture. By giving prominence to data within your care service, you can help to ensure its smooth transition from the point of recording through to displaying it in reporting dashboards across your organisation.

Your data, displayed your way

Being able to easily access, examine and report on the data produced across your services is important in understanding care delivery, what’s working and what can be improved. This covers point of care delivery through to financial management.

It is, therefore, important to provide each user with easy access to the data they need. Your care management software provider should be able to help you here. Certa, for example, is provided with a suite of out of the box reporting and dashboards. These cover the areas of your operation that you need, with the ability for you to self-serve and create your own reports and dashboards. Of course, our team is on hand to assist you when you need.

If that sounds daunting, system training is readily available to those who need it and is covered at the point of implementation.

This gives you the freedom to interrogate your data your way, not just work with a one size fits all solution.

Understand your care services

With robust and bespoke reporting mechanisms in place, you can truly get under the bonnet of your care services. What is working well? What could be improved? Where can efficiencies be found?

Only with the right software supporting you can you answer those questions.

Okay, so what do I need to be looking at?

To get you started, Certa provides the following reporting tools upon implementation, although you can set up bespoke reports or fall back on our team to help you:

• Operational management: Future staff usage, unplanned visit analysis, missed visits, real-time care worker analysis, my tasks (what the user has to complete) and staff compliance (e.g. key accreditations and where they might be expiring).
• Client management: A full overview of each client’s timeline, covering previous and planned visits, actions taken and billing.
• Financial management: Full timesheet reporting with an audit trail of authorisations for timely and accurate billing and pay.
• System administration: A complete audit of system users and admin trails.
• Senior management: Profitability reporting and business insights.
• Client portal: Planned and delivered care with the ability for clients, their friends and family and to see what has happened and what is planned for future visits.

How does this help with CQC inspections?

The CQC, at the point of inspection of your services, will ask five key questions in line with its single assessment framework (SAF). Is you service safe? Effective? Caring? Responsive to people’s needs? Well led?

Whilst parts of the assessment comprise speaking with your staff, opening up your service to inspectors greatly assists in transparently laying out how you work. From here, you can evidence that visits are being conducted by trained, compliant staff in a timely manner, that you consider and respond to the needs of your clients and that you provide the best possible environment in which your carers can succeed in delivering services.

This demonstrates that you’re safe, effective, responsive and well led. To help you with this, we’ve put together a comprehensive CQC inspection checklist, which you can get for free here.

Conclusion

With the aim of your service doubtless being outstanding care delivery to your clients, being able to easily monitor this constantly helps to keep your services on track all the time.

Making reporting and analysis part of your business process makes your services constantly transparent. This makes it easier to identify patterns in your business, understanding what’s working well and what could be improved.

It further helps in demonstrating the quality of your services to prospective clients. CQC inspections are irregular and imperfect as a means of showcasing suitability to clients, so being able to put an arm around their shoulder with aspects such as a friends and family portal makes your services transparent to your clients, too.

You have all the necessary information on your services already, but it’s making it easily accessible and transparent that’s often the difficult part. Certa aims to make this straightforward, putting reporting and insight front and centre of your care management software.

Check out our CQC checklist for a comprehensive guide to preparing for inspections, and head to www.caci.co.uk/certa for more information on Certa.

The new CQC inspection framework poses five key questions of care services. Our checklist is designed to help you be prepared

CQC inspections are a challenging and stressful time for any care service provider. There is always an element of the unknown. However, if you have everything in place it can make the process as smooth as possible and alleviate much of the stress and uncertainty.

We’ve created a free checklist that you can use to help prepare for your CQC inspections. To start, we wanted to look at the CQC inspection framework and how often are CQC inspections. 

How often are CQC inspections? 

How often CQC inspections are conducted on care services depends on when the care service was registered and the results of any previous inspections carried out. 

For newly registered care services, they will be inspected within the first 12 months of opening. 

If a care service achieves a ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ result, then they will be inspected again within the next five years. From CQC data available from August 2023, c.5% of adult social care services in England were rated as outstanding, or roughly 1200 services. Achieving such a result within the CQC’s new inspection framework satisfies them that a service is meeting or exceeding the minimum expectations of recipients of care. 

Where a result falls below this and achieves a CQC inspection result of ‘requires improvement’, the CQC will inspect that service again within the next 12 months, until such a time that the CQC has determined that the service has improved.  

Falling below that and achieving a result of ‘inadequate’ according to the CQC’s inspection framework means that a care service will be inspected within six months. Improvement in such services is considered urgent, so inspections are more frequent to ensure that the necessary improvements happen. 

The CQC’s new inspection framework 

The CQC’s new inspection framework is its single assessment framework (SAF). This CQC inspection framework asks five key questions of every service it inspects. The CQC asks if services are: 

• Safe 
• Effective 
• Caring 
• Responsive to people’s needs 
• Well led 

By obtaining responses to these five key questions, the CQC’s new inspection framework gains deeper understanding of each care service. The CQC answers these questions by visiting the care service, speaking with employees and clients and going through care records, any complaints and feedback. 

How often are CQC inspections and how can you ace them? 

You want the answer to be ‘every five years’. Obviously, you want to be inspected as infrequently as possible. This is the surest sign that your care services are on the right path.  

To help you in achieving this, we’ve put together a checklist that helps you to prepare for inspections inline with the CQC’s inspection framework.  

The checklist takes you through each question in the single assessment framework (SAF), helping you to prepare documents, responses and ensure that staff are briefed prior to a CQC inspection. 

Why not take a look? The checklist is free to download and you get your copy here. 

Person-centred plans help you to unlock the potential of your care services in delivering the best possible outcomes for each of your clients. No two recipients of your services are the same. They require different medication, different services, get on with different people and interact differently with you. This poses a challenge to your services, since there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Deploying the best care management software can help you in delivering digital care plans and digital care planning that puts your clients first and keeps them informed of their care journey. Download a copy of The top seven features you need from your care management software now.

Digital care plans

Moving away from paper records and manual ways of planning carries numerous benefits. By creating digital care plans, you can more easily access information, edit it and share it.

Easy access to digital care plans enables you to report on them internally to better understand patterns in your services. You can then identify what works and what doesn’t. Does a client have a better relationship with one of your care workers than any other, for example? You can then consider such factors when scheduling your care workers.

One thing the CQC looks for during inspections is the role your clients play in their own care. Maintaining digital care plans makes it easier for them to input into their own care and understand their options, including for aspects such as end of life care.

The ability to share your data on clients is also a factor considered by the CQC. Being able to share aspects of your services, such as digital care plans, demonstrates that you can support your clients in their interactions with other services. For example, if they decided to join your services from somewhere else, being able to import and understand their data will help you in providing the best possible care from the very beginning.

Putting clients in control is important. The best care management software will help you by providing a portal through which clients and their loved ones can interact with their digital care plans and your services.

Digital care planning

Digital care planning puts both you and your clients in greater control of the care journey. Feeding your digital care planning into a friends and family portal puts an arm around your clients and their loved ones. Offering such transparency of your services, past, present and future, is impossible with paper records stored in an office.

Clear communication with your care workers is another vital step in delivering outstanding person-centred care to your clients. The best care management software can support your digital care planning with a mobile app. Through this, you can make your digital care plans visible to care workers as and when they need them. At each visit, you can provide clear instructions as to expected time of visit, access and medication required to be administered.

As your care workers work through their visits, they can record outcomes as they go. With real-time visit information available to you, you can then update the client’s portal accordingly, reassuring their loved ones that visits have happened.

Complete digital care planning in this way, from initial plan creation to scheduling care workers to recording visit outcomes, provides you with a complete audit trail of your services. This will make life easier when it comes to CQC inspections, for example. You will be in a strong position to simply make your digital care planning available to inspectors as part of their inspection.

How the best care management software can help you

By having all your data in one place, it makes access and transparency more straightforward. Who did what, where and when? The best care management software will enable easy interrogation of your digital care planning.

It should also be flexible to yours and your clients’ needs. No two clients are the same, nor are two care services. Being able to implement the digital care plans that you and your clients need is imperative in any outstanding care service.

Digital care plans are just one facet of how the best care management software will assist your services. Digital care planning, however, is one of the most important since it outlines how you deliver care to your clients. Ease and transparency are essential. Your software should support this.

We’ve written a free to download white paper outlining the top seven features that the best care management software should provide. From digital care plans to financial management, it should underpin your outstanding services.

Why not take a look? It’s free to download here.

Person-centred care planning and delivery is the backbone of any outstanding care service. It’s something that the CQC actively looks for when conducting inspections, a hallmark of quality care services. From planning and delivering to putting your clients in control of the care they receive, how can you best deliver person-centred care? Download a copy of The top seven features you need from your care management software now.

Person-centred care starts with the person

It’s obvious to point out, but the best way of delivering person-centred care is by involving them. Understanding each client’s medical and care needs is one thing, but how involved are they in the process of the care they receive?

A central record for each client is essential. A care management system can support you in this by providing an easy to create and easy to edit record for every client. When they enter your service, being able to understand their medical record and the exact care they need collaboratively with them is imperative. You can then provide this information to your care workers ahead of and during visits, ensuring that the right care is administered at the right time.

But people’s needs evolve over time. From new prescriptions to changes in preferences, keeping the care you provide to each client up to date is vital. It is also important to be able to share their data with third parties and other providers for any care they receive outside of your services. A care management system can support you in easily and securely sharing relevant data in line with data protection regulations.

The needs and desires of your clients may also change over time. In a lot of care settings, aspects such as end of life often need to be considered. Putting your clients in control of this process is essential. Every client deserves a bespoke care plan and the dignity and respect to make their own decisions.

Involve their loved ones in their person-centred care

In a lot of cases, your clients will have loved ones who are actively interested in the care you provide to them. Reassuring them of upcoming and completed visits, the activities and tasks undertaken, as well as any actions to be taken, is a great way of involving them and evidencing how person-centred you are being.

This can be achieved through the provision of a friends and family portal. Your care management software should support you in establishing this, making simple, secure logins available to authorised users to access a client’s care plan. This is also a great way of getting feedback from your clients on the services they are receiving from you.

Users logging on to the portal can see upcoming and completed visits and obtain information such as medication administered and to be administered. A portal is also a great way of receiving input from family members too, where small details or observations around tweaking your care planning can prove really transformative for the person you support.

Understanding clients’ preferences

A simple way of going above and beyond in providing person-centred care to your clients is to understand their preferences. The CQC notes that these should be recorded once and shared with relevant stakeholders across your care service to avoid duplication of questions with clients.

This helps to add a human touch to their care. If, for example, you have someone who owns cats, this could be something that could be discussed with them during their visits.

Also, if they have upcoming life events, such as a birthday, prompting this information to your care workers means that it’s easy for them to mention and take into consideration. Understanding your clients and sharing this type of understanding with your care workers can deliver excellent outcomes.

Your care management software can help you with the provision of a mobile app for your care workers. They can access visit information and see details such as birthdays and interests in the app as they go about their visits.

Continuity of care is another important means of providing person-centred care. Clients will naturally establish relationships with certain care workers. By rostering care workers consistently to clients, you can provide this continuity.

Again, your care management software should help with this. Making rostering easier, technology can suggest ‘best fit’ allocations of care workers to care plans, considering not only relevant skills and experience, but also factors such as them having a positive relationship with a care worker.

Conclusion

There are several factors that play directly into providing outstanding person-centred care. From understanding the client and their medical needs, to sharing this information with your care workers and rostering the right staff to the right clients, person-centred care requires research, effort and consistency.

Care management software can underpin this process. Creating a central record of each client makes understanding them and their bespoke needs easier. Equally, a central record of each care worker facilitates smoother alignment of your care plans and your staff rosters.

It’s one thing providing person-centred care, and another evidencing it. When CQC inspections inevitably come around, being able to display your care planning, rosters, client visit history and records of communication, you can more easily demonstrate to external stakeholders that your care service puts its clients first.

Every client deserves their own bespoke care plan. Every client deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. Ensuring this happens can be easier than you might think.

We’ve covered this and more in our latest white paper which outlines the top seven features the best care management software should provide to you. It’s free to download, so why not take a look?

There are several issues at the forefront of the minds of those involved in the care industry right now. From managing CQC inspections to coping with increasing vacancies in the sector, there are several key issues to traverse. Throw in data security and the need to digitise care records and it can appear an overwhelming to do list. Alongside evolving concerns, however, are evolving solutions. There is an increasingly prevalent role being played by care management technology in the care sector. We wanted to round up a few key issues from the 2024 Care Show and look at how they can be addressed. 

CQC inspections 

Finding a popular regulator in any industry is difficult, but there’s a widespread challenge across the care sector in understanding the Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) single assessment framework (SAF).  

The outbreak of the global Covid pandemic saw a shift to a risk-based approach. The number of completed CQC inspections is yet to reach pre-pandemic levels. This has left some care providers with a rating of ‘requires improvement’ hanging over them for a number of years. This has a knock-on effect on client confidence and the wider business. 

When it comes to inspections, it was clear across the Care Show that there’s dissatisfaction and misunderstanding of the SAF, too.  

How can care management technology help? 

Whilst care management technology can do nothing to alter the rate of inspections, it can help care providers get into position for them. If all your care plans, records and outcomes are recorded in a central system, it makes the process of presenting evidence to the CQC much easier. 

When it comes to answering specific questions, having all the information easily available reduces the effort in answering them. 

Digitising social care 

“70% of providers have digital social care records. This is expected to reach 80% by March 2025,” says Peter Skinner, programme director, digitising social care at the NHS.  

Technology is accepted as having a crucial role for care providers and their clients. More links need to be established between care providers and the NHS. Care management technology is a key enabler in getting people back into a residential setting following hospital visits. It’s also a key enabler in equipping NHS staff with the right information and context on a client when they have to visit hospital. 

The NHS has built standard data capture, the market now needs to understand how it can be used. It’s a two-way journey: admissions info for NHS staff and discharge info back to providers. Joining these up will create efficiencies and a better process for people receiving care. The standardised data set exists at a national level, making it easy to access for everyone with a single access point. 

It’s important to maintain standards for providers accessing technology. The NHS is driving interoperability and providers needs to understand what they’re buying. 

How can care management technology help? 

This is an obvious area in which care management technology is imperative. Maintaining paper records is inefficient and risks vital information going missing. Being able to share the digital information captured with stakeholders quickly and accurately improves care quality. Failing to act on the point of digitising care planning and records will see providers left behind.  

If you’re still working manually, it’s time to speak to a care management software provider. Equally as important, you also need to understand what you’re buying and the impact it will have on your business. 

Cyber security 

This is perhaps another obvious area for technology, but cyber security is a genuine concern in the care industry. The process of caring for people necessitates the handling and processing of sensitive information. Such information is valuable to criminals. So, how can you best protect yourself? 

One of the points raised across the Care Show was the need to continually educate your staff, from administrators to care workers. Your cyber security is only as good as your weakest link. If someone clicks on a malicious link, that can be enough to cause chaos. 

How can care management technology help? 

Partnering with a care management technology provider is an opportunity to gain real peace of mind with your data security. An obvious starting point is to check their security certificates for things like Cyber Essentials and ISO27001. This offers assurance that your care management technology partner is certified to the highest standards. 

There are other factors to consider, such as where your data will be stored. For example, CACI use AWS to store Certa’s data. This helps to leverage Amazon’s significant security expenditure for your data. 

The care workforce 

There is general dismay at the attitude towards and treatment of care workers in the UK. “They are underpaid and underappreciated,” said Karolina Gerlich, CEO of The Care Workers’ Charity. “Recent pay rises of 10p per hour are unacceptable. Care workers are considered low skilled and those arriving from overseas don’t enjoy benefits such as being able to bring their own families with them.” 

There is little surprise that care workers are being easily tempted away by other industries. They get similar or better pay and less stressful working conditions. It’s therefore unsurprising that vacancy rates are so high in the care sector. 

Beyond that, there was discussion at the Care Show around how providers can better support their care workers. It is widely believed that more support is required, in terms of communication and specialisation. This comes back to understanding your workforce. Assigning care workers to areas that they’re really good at and really interested in is an effective way of keeping them engaged. Further focussing training for them on those areas is another positive. 

Training was mentioned as something that needs to go beyond just mandatory refresher training, to courses that expand people’s professional profiles, offering them career development.  

Communication is another vital thread. Considering the impact of new technology on care workers and involving them in the decision making process helps to make them feel appreciated and involved. Bringing them closer to the central team improves connection and the sense of involvement. Ultimately, if you look after your care workers, you reduce your expenditure on recruitment, especially at a time when there are more vacancies than care workers. Having a happy, consistent team of care workers will also ensure the ongoing quality and consistency of care you provide to your client. 

How can care management technology help? 

Care technology can support care workers in several ways. Simple additions to your care management technology such as a care worker app can help to clearly communicate with care workers and enhance lone worker safety.  

It can also help you in understanding your care workers and their expertise. What do they specialise in? What are they good at? Which clients do they get on with? How can you make their day efficient and effective? How can you ensure they have all the information they need for each visit? 

Care management technology can support this. You can then better roster your care workers and provide appropriate training opportunities. In the same way that no two clients are the same, nor are two care workers. They have different interests and specialities. Providing them with the opportunity to enhance their careers with you will make them more likely to stay. 

The cost of recruitment is only going up and with more vacancies than care workers there is ample opportunity for care workers to explore other opportunities. Simply treating them fairly, involving them and offering training and progression is a great way to go about keeping them. 

Conclusion 

There were several points of interest across the Care Show. If you’re affected or concerned by any of the issues raised here, we’ve designed Certa to help you. Find out more by visiting https://www.caci.co.uk/software/certa/  

Having the ability to automate your competency management process enhances your workforce scheduling, improving output and safety

When assigning staff to tasks and schedules, understanding their core competencies is essential. As a stark and wholly unfair example, in a transport organisation you wouldn’t assign an accountant to drive a train. Nor would you ask a train driver to look over your accounts. Understanding an individual’s skills, training and experience is essential. It’s essential to the smooth running of your services and the safety of your workers and end users. Competency management is central to this.

Running schedules in a live and constantly evolving environment such as transport is difficult. There’s the basic schedule to adhere to. Then there are events, often beyond your control, which can curtail even the best laid plans. Being able to respond to these unforeseen circumstances swiftly and accurately is the difference between minimising service disruption and lengthy delays or cancelations.

This goes beyond transport, too. In construction, for example, if there is an accident on site or work isn’t carried out to the required standard, it can cause delays and impact the cost of the project.

The most reliable way of minimising such incidents is by having the right people in the right place at the right time. Your competency management framework plays a vital role in this. It achieves this not only by ensuring staff are trained, skilled and experienced, but also by being made transparent and available across your organisation. The link between training, assessment and scheduling needs to be seamless. Information must be available in real-time and events responded to accordingly.

What does real-time competency management look like?

Automation is key here. Let’s take the example of a train driver being assessed. Their ongoing competence is paramount to the smooth and safe running of services. Regular assessments need to be scheduled, conducted and reported on.

Driver A is due for their assessment. The assessor needs to be notified of the need to assess them and they will then go about conducting the assessment. Once the assessment is complete, they will then need to record the outcome of it. If Driver A has passed the assessment, this information needs to be made available to the driver, their management team and the scheduling team. In this scenario, it’s a case of confirming business as usual.

But what if Driver A fails to pass their assessment? In this scenario, further training may be required as remedial action to rectify their error. If the assessor notes Driver A as having failed, there needs to be a swift chain reaction to this. Driver A must be notified, their managers too, plus the scheduling team. Driver A may need to be removed from duty until such a time that they have undertaken the requisite training. This means, therefore, that the training team must be notified, too, with a view to booking Driver A in for training asap.

The scheduling team will then need to arrange to have another driver cover any shifts that they are booked in for. This triggers its own chain of communication, impacting another driver and their ongoing shifts. Regulations around working hours must be factored in and adhered to.

Automating this process makes it more efficient. Information, rather than being siloed by department, can be shared electronically at the point of input. This means that the driver, their managers, the scheduling team and the training department can all act quickly.

How do organisations automate their competency management?

This is a process that Transport for London (TfL) operates through CACI’s Cygnum software. Assessors are assigned to a list of tube drivers who need assessing, they can see their routes and timings and meet drivers at a station that best suits them. The results are recorded instantly and follow-up activities are automatically triggered.

Assessors access a priority list of drivers on the go through Cygnum. They can see where drivers are due or coming up for assessment. This means they can prioritise accordingly. Using the Cygnum Mobile app, assessors can record results on the go, in real time.

Obviously mobile reception can be an issue on sections of the London Underground. Where this is the case, results are stored offline on the app to be uploaded as soon as possible once reception is available again.

With results recorded in or near to real time, TfL’s training and scheduling teams have accurate and up to date information available to them. For the training team, their list of drivers is demand driven, so those drivers who need to receive training most are put to the front of the queue. This minimises frontline absences.

Ongoing training can be enhanced via automation too. Regular checks, from safety briefings to eyesight checks need to be conducted and recorded. Sending reminders and auto-booking people onto courses makes for a smoother process.

Network Rail operates its training management programme through Cygnum. This enables Network Rail to automate vast swathes of its training operation. Mandatory courses are booked in advance, attendance is accurately monitored and results are recorded and shared across the organisation.

The automation of this enables Network Rail to not only keep abreast of its training courses and who needs to attend, but also to inform schedulers of their outcomes. This is essential in keeping the right people in the right place at the right time.

Conclusion

Whilst automation of competency management can be incredibly useful across any transport organisation, it is only as reliable as the data entered into your system. Bringing data together from across your organisation is essential. Where data become siloed, its usefulness is stunted. Creating a single view requires the input of every department.

Automation can make the crucial task of keeping the right people in the right place at the right time more straightforward. It can alert you and your staff of required upcoming training. Assessments can be scheduled well in advance with results logged instantly. Training can be booked when it’s needed, including in a demand-led fashion. Again, making the outcomes of sessions available to the wider business instantly facilitates accurate and timely decision making.

Ultimately, automation of competency management underpins accurate scheduling. Assigning tasks to staff safe in the knowledge that they are the right people to perform such tasks is essential in transport. In any industry with moving parts, being able to make changes in a live environment is also essential. When schedulers and administrators have to manually trawl through records to evidence the changes they wish to make, it wastes valuable time. Being able to instantly understand someone’s suitability for a task, against their core competencies, skills, experience and working patterns, saves time and keeps services moving.

Automation is undoubtedly challenging to achieve, but the results are well worth it.

How technology is enhancing safety for rail workers at organisations like Network Rail and Transport for London (TfL)

Whilst the UK is in the enviable position of having one of the safest rail networks in the world, that’s not to say that things couldn’t be improved upon. Technology is playing a major role in advancing safety standards and enhancing safety for the rail network’s workforce and passengers. This case study looks at how Network Rail and Transport for London (TfL) are utilising CACI’s Cygnum software to support their efforts in managing the training and competency of their workforce.

Beyond the immediate safety of the workforce, enhancements in training and competency management serve to reduce overarching risk. Risk takes on many forms in the rail industry. Mistakes can lead to health and safety incidents; they can also result in service disruption and delayed projects. If staff aren’t appropriately trained, mistakes are more likely to occur. If staff aren’t assessed, there’s no knowledge and reporting on frontline delivery.

Capturing data and appropriately acting upon it is vital to a successful training and competency management framework. Being able to schedule training and assessments effectively and efficiently, whilst also being able to capture outcomes in real-time, helps organisations to maintain core competencies across their workforce and provide opportunities for career progression, an expansion in the available pool of skills and also the opportunity for re-training and mandatory ongoing training where necessary.

Training management

Training management takes many guises within an organisation such as Network Rail, which has a workforce of over 48,000 people. From mandatory ongoing training courses to more advanced, career progressing initiatives, Network Rail caters for its workforce with the provision of thousands of courses every year across 11 national training centres.

Running this process efficiently is paramount in achieving the desired training outcomes. Where manual processes are involved in inviting staff to mandatory sessions and checking that they have attended, mistakes inevitably creep in. This can result in staff attending the wrong courses, being sent to the wrong location or not attending.

Implementing a technology system can help to alleviate such issues, with automated checking of course prerequisites, auto-booking of staff to mandatory courses at defined intervals, auto-logging attendance on the day (plus any results that are required) and creating efficiency and consistency across the process. This leaves the more manual aspects to exceptions and more complex arrangements.

Furthermore, a robust training management programme enables organisations to diversify and enhance the range of skills available to them within their existing workforce. If places on courses are free, then they can be offered out to the wider workforce. This improves efficiency by helping to keep courses full. Making best use of available training resources by ensuring that courses are run to capacity and any vacant spaces are offered to interested employees who would benefit from the training opportunity, continuously enhances the core competencies and career opportunities available to your workforce.

Each training course costs money to run, from the trainer, the time taken by the employee and the room and facilities used. Finding a way of maximising the results of this expenditure is crucial. With improved visibility of class utilisation via Cygnum, Network Rail can offer out vacant course places to the wider rail industry, thereby supporting other organisations in their training needs and helping to support the wider safety standards of the rail industry.

Competency management

Closely linked to training is competency management. TfL utilises Cygnum to support the ongoing competency management of its 4,500+ Underground drivers. At a basic level, competency management is ensuring that staff are competent to perform their roles. For example that they are appropriately trained and qualified for the tasks they are undertaking. Beyond that, competency management helps organisations to understand the skills at their disposal across their workforce.

It also ties into training where mandatory ongoing training is required to maintain competence for a role. For train drivers, this includes basic aspects such as eyesight checks. It also establishes the triggering of mandatory training where mistakes have been made out in the field. Similarly to Network Rail, TfL can then schedule training at the point of a result being logged. This ensures that all drivers have access to relevant and necessary training to ensure ongoing competence.

To further have assurance on driver competency, TfL carries out ‘on the job’ staff assessments. These are scheduled by Cygnum automatically based on business rules and the driver’s duty rota. Both the assessor and driver are notified instantly. This reduces the manual effort in arranging assessments, making the process more efficient.

When an assessor assesses a driver, they can capture the outcomes on their mobile device via Cygnum’s mobile app, Cygnum Mobile. Results are uploaded to the Cygnum database and any follow up activities are automatically triggered as a result. Cygnum Mobile also includes offline data capture capability, to mitigate poor mobile reception when operating underground.

Improving workforce safety and reducing risk

By running robust training and competency management programmes, Network Rail and TfL are better positioned to monitor the skills of their workforce and ensure that appropriately trained and competent personnel are operating their services. This further helps them to monitor the safety of their networks by ensuring that all operators are compliant with industry safety standards.

Of course, no system can eradicate human error, but technology can help in prioritising workforce safety whilst at the same time encouraging career progression and the expansion of available skills within the workforce. Where the workforce is trained and regularly assessed, incidents can be kept to a minimum and when they do occur, understanding why is made easier. This is because the competencies, training, skills and experience of those involved can be quickly understood in reporting on incidents.

Having a complete picture of skills, experience and the results of regular assessments also supports administrative and scheduling staff and accurately and fairly assigning tasks to appropriate members of the workforce. Having a central view of core competencies set against bespoke business rules facilitates a degree of automation in scheduling, which reduces manual effort, improves accuracy and makes it easier to handle exceptions. Creating a central view of staff skills enhances workforce safety and reduces risk, since it reduces the likelihood of staff being assigned to tasks to which they’re not suitable for.

For more information on Cygnum, please visit: https://www.caci.co.uk/software/cygnum/m/

CACI is delighted to announce that its Cygnum software will be used by the Environment Agency as a logistics planning tool to schedule its workforce and assets in the preparation of and response to incidents across England ranging from small pollution incidents to widespread flooding. Cygnum will support the Environment Agency in scheduling the 7,000 staff members who have an incident role.

The Environment Agency has around 450 staff on duty 24/7 ready to respond to incidents. These roles cover specific or multiple geographical locations or are nationwide. In the event of larger incidents, the Environment Agency needs to scale up its response, with more people involved and   requiring the movement of people and equipment across the country to support them. The Cygnum solution will be used to plan both the duty roster of the workforce as well as the rostering of specific incidents as they occur. This will include managing the sharing of staff and equipment between teams where necessary.

“We’re delighted that the Environment Agency has chosen our Cygnum solution as its logistics planning tool,” says Ollie Watson, group business development director at CACI. “We have extensive experience in delivering solutions for largescale workforce management requirements and the team is excited to be supporting the Environment Agency in achieving these important outcomes.”

For more information on Cygnum and how it supports businesses, please visit: https://www.caci.co.uk/software/cygnum/

Having the right people in the right place at the right time sounds easy. In largescale transport organisation, effective scheduling is crucial

At the heart of workforce management sits the simple sounding task of scheduling. Your organisation has shifts to fulfil and a pool of workers to fulfil them. Add staff to the rota and away you go. Such shift patterns can be sacrosanct across organisations of any size, providing clarity to workers, management and administrators alike. In largescale transport organisations, however, there are several moving parts to consider and shift patterns can be thrown off course by anything from weather to equipment failure and cancellations in the supply chain.

This blog aims to take a closer look at scheduling in transport organisations. It’s a topic we’ve covered in greater detail in our recent white paper, Tackling workforce management complexities in transport. If you would like to explore the topic in greater detail, you can download a free copy here.

There are myriad tasks that need completing across the transport industry. The complication introduced to the scheduling process often requires a lot of manual work by administrators and schedulers. People fall ill, take holidays and external events can throw a schedule completely off kilter.

Automation in workforce management

Automation of scheduling can greatly reduce the administrative burden. At its most prosaic, automation can simply assign workers to shifts in advance. This can be set out indefinitely, with new workers swapped in for departing/unavailable members of staff easily. Such a process can consider your bespoke business rules and any other factors such as the working time directive and fatigue management.

Where automation can lend a vital hand is in times of strain. We’ve seen examples, notably during the Covid pandemic, of vast swathes of a workforce being absent at once. Where a manual process exists, this resulted in inevitable cancellations of services. With carefully configured automation, it is possible to be more agile in the face of disruption.

Where a worker is absent, having a central system and a central view of your entire workforce enables swift consideration of replacements. This works for smaller examples, too. For example, if a train is delayed and members of crew onboard it are required to meet another service which they will now miss, how can this be handled?

An automated process enables identification of other members of staff who are nearby and can be reassigned, whilst at the same time handling all communications with staff members. The staff who have been delayed can then be reassigned to other tasks, ensuring that their shift isn’t wasted.

Variable demand and moving parts

Another factor to consider in the transport industry is variable demand and moving parts. A high level example of this is the change in train timetables during the Christmas period. Fewer customers means less demand for services, therefore, services can be reduced to ensure more efficient use of the network and staff time.

A more short-term example of this is in shipping. Where a port is expecting a shipment, staff need to be prepared to meet it to initiate the unloading and loading of it. Variation is frequent in such a scenario, since ships can be diverted at a moment’s notice to other ports due to factors such as storms. Another example would be the blockage of the Suez Canal. This can leave a port with a full roster of staff without a function to fulfil. This is a waste of time, money and staffing resources.

Mapping out the changes caused by variable demand in a central system can help to understand its implications. Factors such as cost can be calculated and your response to it can be better informed. Understanding where the risks of variable demand are most likely to occur can help mitigate its impact.

Another example is with revenue protection officers on trains. Understanding the demand for services helps to better utilise them. There’s little point, for example, scheduling ticket inspectors during rush hour to major stations, since moving through the train is all but impossible. Similarly, there are more likely to be barriers at major stations, so working out the best deployment of such staff is more likely to realise the ultimate aim of their work.

Overlaying tasks onto shifts

Establishing a schedule is one thing. Rosters can be worked out well in advance and communicated to staff. But what happens when they show up on the day? Often the set number of employees turn up and discover the specifics of their tasks at that point.

Utilising a workforce management system such as Cygnum helps organisations to understand the specifics of the tasks that need be fulfilled during a shift. This helps organisations to better prepare aspects such as equipment required, time needed to complete the task and where exactly they need to be.

This helps to drive better understanding and efficiency through shifts and tasks. Matching specific skills and experiences to not only shifts, but also tasks, better ensures that the right people are performing the right tasks.

Conclusion

Scheduling can be a complicated and nuanced process, especially across largescale organisations. With several moving parts, variable demand, unpredictable disruptions and the usual ebb and flow of workforce absences, managing the process can be extremely complicated. This can result in inefficiency and poor service delivery.

Introducing automation, clear communication and overlaying tasks onto shifts helps to better understand your workforce the tasks required of them and more accurately assign staff to tasks based on their skills, experience, training, availability and geographic location.

This is a topic that we’ve explored in greater detail in our recent white paper, which you can download freely here. Alternatively, if you would like more information on how Cygnum can help you with your workforce management requirements, please visit our website.

Reducing risk entails several factors. Most pertinently, worker safety. Rules and regulations exist to protect workers, from health and safety directives to working time directives, covering working conditions to fatigue. Then there’s risk to projects and tasks. If they are done improperly, then tasks need to be redone. This impacts overarching projects, both in terms of time and cost. Of course, accidents and mistakes happen. Building in mitigation for such events is prudent. But what if you can identify patterns and head off errors before they happen? Competency management, as part of a robust workforce management process, can help.

Workforce management – training 

Training management is essential across largescale workforces. From mandatory ongoing courses, refresher courses and training staff in new skills to upskill your workforce and offer career progression, having a robust training programme in place forms the backbone of this. 

By linking training to other areas of your workforce management, such as assessments and scheduling, it makes it possible to identify skills gaps across your workforce. To reduce the risk of these gaps impacting upon project and service delivery, you can appropriately train existing members of staff to fill these gaps.  

It also makes it possible to utilise your training programme to focus on specific areas and tasks where mistakes are occurring. By pooling data from accidents and assessments, you can identify repeat errors. In doing so, you can then tailor your approach to training to better prepare staff for areas in which, statistically, they are most likely to pose a risk to themselves and overarching projects. 

Workforce management – assessments 

Knowing that staff have the appropriate qualifications, skills, training and experience is one thing. But how are they actually fulfilling the tasks to which they have been assigned? Regular, ongoing assessments of your workforce are crucial. This is both from a safety and a service delivery perspective.  

From a safety perspective, many roles within the transport industry pose a safety risk. From infrastructure workers to drivers, the risk of getting things wrong can be catastrophic. It’s prudent to check in to ensure that tasks are being conducted properly. 

From a service delivery perspective, mistakes can result in shoddy work. This means that it needs to be redone, which costs time and money, impacting upon project timelines and budgets.  

This extends to maintenance, too. We regularly see on the rail network, for example, things such as signal failures which result in delays and cancellations. Regular assessments of infrastructure are vital to repairing the roof whilst the sun is shining.  

Overarching planning to manage risk 

Proper, robust planning builds in sufficient time to complete tasks, with enough room for reasonable error. People make mistakes, external factors such as the weather can waylay you and where there are several moving parts. Things don’t always come together as you’d hope. Mitigating for this by building it into your planning is sensible. 

When it comes to specific tasks, however, granular detail is important. When scheduling your workforce, workers can be assigned to shifts on a rolling basis ad infinitum. But how can the specifics and the complexity of each shift and its tasks be considered? How can these then be communicated with staff? 

Using a central system with the ability to overlay such complexity onto shifts can drive efficiency and greater control of the overarching project and its processes. It can be established according to your bespoke business rules and configured to factor in elements such as regulations and directives. 

Understanding what will happen during a shift is important. If maintenance needs to be performed, being able to communicate exactly what equipment is required, the nature of the task and the location helps to prepare people. As the process continues, being able to intelligently alter task timelines based upon previous completion times and rates enables a more accurate scheduling of tasks. If, for example, you have set aside three hours for the completion of a task but staff are regularly completing it in two hours, then future timelines can be adjusted accordingly. 

This helps to drive a more complete understanding of your projects and how your staff are performing against timelines and tasks. This in turn helps to mitigate the risk of work running over time, since you can rely on a robust database of previous work to inform future projects.  

Conclusion 

Finally, the regulatory aspect is crucial. Things such as the working time directive exist to combat elements such as fatigue. A central database that can further call upon the geographic location of staff can help to more efficiently assign them to tasks. If someone is 20mins away from the location of a task, it makes more sense to assign them to it than someone 1hr away. Since travelling time is considered as a factor in fatigue management, it’s an extremely inefficient use of time to swallow it up on travelling times. 

Managing risk extends across the entirety of the transport industry, from workforce safety to service delivery. With so many moving parts – risks – being able to navigate them and efficiently and reliably match those moving parts to your targets is essential to achieving the ultimate goals of your organisation. A well trained, regularly assessed and robustly scheduled workforce forms the backbone of this.  

The technology exists to help largescale transport organisations to gain greater control of their workforce management. From training and assessments to scheduling, having a single view of your workforce facilitates automation, insight and, ultimately, efficiency. It’s a topic we’ve explored in more detail in our recent white paper, Tackling workforce management complexities in transport. You can download your free copy here.

CACI is delighted to announce that its Cygnum software is now being used as Network Rail’s planning and administration solution for training its 43,000-strong workforce.

Cygnum supports all aspects of Network Rail’s training management, from automated creation of courses based on demand, intelligent allocation of staff, trainers and resources to courses, to communication of planning and optimisation of changes. Cygnum will assist Network Rail in achieving a holistic view of all its training and results, helping it to realise efficiencies across the process and ensure that all staff are appropriately trained. The attendance and results of courses are logged in Cygnum, with the system submitting course invitation and joining instructions to Network Rail staff, as well as actioning any follow-ups as required.

“We are delighted that Network Rail has chosen CACI’s Cygnum software to support and underpin its training planning and administration process,” says Ollie Watson, Group Business Development Director at CACI. “We are looking forward to supporting Network Rail in achieving a more efficient and streamlined training programme that delivers necessary and ongoing training to its workforce as optimally as possible.”

For more information on Cygnum and how it supports businesses, please visit: https://www.caci.co.uk/software/cygnum/

CACI is pleased to announce that its Cygnum solution is now being used by Transport for London (TfL) to support the competency management process for its 4,500 London Underground drivers.

Cygnum is designed to assist organisations in all aspects of their workforce management, from scheduling and competency management, through to training and recruitment, helping to keep appropriately skilled, experienced and qualified staff performing tasks. Cygnum will assist TfL in gaining a holistic view of the ongoing competencies of its London Underground drivers.

“We’re delighted that TfL has chosen our Cygnum software to underpin the ongoing competency management of its tube drivers,” says Ollie Watson, Group Business Development Director at CACI. “We’re looking forward to continuing to work closely with TfL on its Cygnum solution to help ensure that its competency management programme is run efficiently and effectively into the future.”

For more information on Cygnum and how it supports businesses, please visit https://www.caci.co.uk/software/cygnum/

How does a challenging economy affect consumer choices and priorities that shape the UK market for elderly care?

It’s no surprise that the cost of living squeeze is having an impact on elderly care operators. Private residential and domestic care cost money: consumers are looking for ways to economise. Older people want and need comfort and care as much as ever, but they and their families are tightening their belts. Inevitably, they’re considering the cost of different care settings and options.

What does this mean for residential and domiciliary care providers? It’s early days, but as for every other consumer sector, you need to be prepared for the market to change. A proactive approach to understanding current and future customers and modelling potential demand in your locations can uncover opportunities to maintain occupancy and optimise your services to match evolving priorities and needs.

If you don’t have a crystal ball to hand, that may sound like a tall order. But knowing and anticipating market demand in your locations doesn’t depend on magic or guesswork. Consumer and location data together provide reliable evidence that can help you identify ways to stay relevant, accessible and financially stable.

Not all groups are impacted to the same extent by the rising costs of living. The majority of Acorn Groups still have a sizeable disposable income despite the recent 5% average fall.

Source: CACI Paycheck Disposable Income 2022 v2

Despite the bleak headlines, the economic impact varies considerably for different household types and in different areas. Many older consumers still have savings, disposable income or assets that allow them to choose the care they want. If you can understand the profile of your current and future customers in detail, it’s easier to identify and reach out to local prospects.

Location intelligence data is a well-established source of insight for care home operators and domestic care providers that are considering expansion or new sites. Mapping the age and affluence of the local population in a potential catchment helps to indicate where there’s likely demand for elderly care services.

But alongside age and income, there’s a lot of more subtle data that can help you market your existing services, confirm or reshape your propositions, benchmark your pricing and adjust the range and type of services you offer. This type of insight is extremely useful in a fast-changing market.

CACI data insights can answer crucial questions about your customers and market:

• What are the characteristics of your local and target customers? Acorn profiling groups UK consumers by affluence, life stage and priorities
• What are your current and potential customers thinking, feeling and intending to do differently Quarterly Consumer insight surveys of the UK population
• How has customer spending on different outgoings changed? Transactional spending data shows the split of spend with different brands and operators
• Whose disposable income is affected? Postcode model of income in different locations, showing how it’s being spent.
• What’s around the corner? Dynamic modelling forecasts what could happen to consumer spending if inflation, fuel and other costs rise in a range of different ways

CACI’s current disposable income model reflects the changes we’ve observed in the last few months. Although all households are affected by rising costs, the majority of our Acorn consumer profile groups still have a significant disposable income. It’s groups like Student Life and City Sophisticates that have seen the largest decline, driven by property costs.

There has been major growth in spend on private healthcare, with a wide range of demographics prioritising health over other non-essential spending.

Source: CACI Transactional Spend, June 2022

For elderly care operators, it’s encouraging to note that Comfortable Seniors, Countryside Communities and Successful Suburbs, who are likely to form far more of the target market, have some of the highest levels of disposable income, reflecting smaller or non-existent mortgages, good pensions and comfortable savings accrued over previous years.

Spending on private healthcare has increased in the past year. The Covid-19 pandemic and concerns about NHS waiting lists are driving this change in priorities for households across most Acorn groups. Despite rising essential costs, many consumers now regard healthcare expenditure as a necessity, not a luxury. This could have a positive impact on perceptions of value in elderly care.

These are just the headlines from our latest national data. Every elderly care provider has a different operating model and works in unique locations. CACI’s health and social care team can select data and build customised reports that directly reflect the opportunities and changes happening in your catchment areas today and tomorrow. For mid-sized operators, it’s vital decision-making information to inform strategy and tactical decisions that will help your business compete and thrive in a challenging economy.

We can help you:

• Continuously analyse, monitor and adapt – stay ahead of policy and new competitors when finding new customers and recruits
• Tailor marketing engagement and recruitment key messages to reflect the requirements of local potential pools of customers and staff
• Understand your staff and customer base and how its segments are impacted by different cost of living challenges, to identify risk and opportunity
• Tailor your offer to changing consumer and staff requirements

CACI’s specialist elderly care and senior living team work with clients in the UK and internationally to help them improve operational and financial performance with access to vital insights into their customers, employees and locations.

To find out more, contact us.

What does a good procurement process look like? Something we often see in the market are knee-jerk reactions. A problem within an organisation has been identified so a tender has gone out to market in a bid to rectify it. Whilst this can work, it pays to have an intimate understanding of what your problem is, how you would like to solve it and the impact the solution will have on your team and the future of your service.  

Ultimately, understanding your procurement needs is the first step of your new project.  

Once understanding is established, it makes life a lot easier (for you and a provider) when the implementation phase of the project gets underway. 

Understanding procurement to understand the project 

At CACI, we use our proprietary FUSION project management methodology to underpin every implementation that we deliver to customers. The first phase of this is to shape the project. Working closely with your team, we establish what the project will look like, what your needs are and what success will look like. This is the stage where buy-in needs to be established across your teams, from management to end-user levels.  

Having a fundamental understanding of why you’re purchasing a new technology solution makes this stage far more straightforward. It’s very difficult to elaborate on vague concepts and ideas. 

Helping your chosen technology provider to help you is half the battle: 

• What are the long-term, strategic aims of your service? 
• What areas of practice do you need the technology to assist with? 
• How will it positively impact your team? 
• How you will resource the project internally? 
• What timelines are you aiming to achieve? 
• How will training be conducted? 
• How will the system handle departures and new starters? 
• What do you want the system to look like in five years’ time? 

Starting with the why 

What do you want and why do you want it? It sounds like such a simple question, but a failure to grasp this point creates major issues over the lifecycle of a project. It makes it difficult to obtain buy-in internally, whilst making it difficult to explain to a provider what you need their technology to achieve for you. 

This needs consideration of everyone involved, from those responsible for the procurement through to those who will be working with the technology and service users. Across this spectrum, what does good look like? 

This is when knee-jerk reactions can hamper the success of a project, where it is deemed to be important to be implementing a system in response to a situation, rather than considering the value proposition and impact of new software thoroughly. If a decision has been made in haste, without due consideration as to how it will impact end users and service users, then the definition of success will likely deviate from the originally intended definition. They may well feel that the existing solution works well for them, too. Change management is another important consideration from the outset – FUSION change management. 

It is also important to understand your existing technology infrastructure. Often we see cases of competing influences within an organisation, whereby a decision is made as to the infrastructure based upon cost and/or convenience for the IT team. Whilst these are undoubtedly important considerations, it can leave organisations relying upon software which doesn’t meet the required outcomes for staff and end users. 

Understanding why you need new technology and focussing on those outcomes, before taking a tender to market, helps the lifecycle of the project. 

How CACI can help 

If you are looking for new solutions, it is worth speaking to providers before entering a formal procurement process. Of course, procurement needs to be conducted along specific guidelines set by your organisation but speaking to providers to gauge an understanding of their technology and how it might benefit your organisation is a good idea. 

Furthermore, at CACI we have worked with countless customers on implementation and project management. We developed FUSION based upon the understanding of project delivery accrued  over thousands of projects. We can work with you and your team outline how the project would be developed and delivered, outlining each step to help you achieve project buy-in across everyone affected. 

Procurement frameworks 

The final step, once you’ve understood what the project is and what success will look like, is understanding how you can procure. CACI is listed on several public service procurement frameworks. Going through this route can help to avoid lengthy tenders and legal wrangling over contracts. Talking to providers in advance will help in gathering this knowledge so that once you’re ready to move, the procurement process runs as smoothly as possible. 

Planning and scheduling the nursing workforce during the pandemic

Like so many industries and bodies, the NHS had to adapt in several ways during the Covid pandemic. The frontline of its efforts to tackle the virus made the headlines, but away from Covid wards there was a necessity for the NHS to adapt its processes and practices around the threat posed.

One such example regards district nursing – how was the NHS able to effectively and efficiently plan and schedule its nursing workforce in the face of meeting the challenge of delivering vital services away from hospitals?

In short, there was something of a struggle across some NHS Trusts to meet this challenge. The usual routine of bringing vulnerable patients into the hospital environment for the administration of care had to be reviewed in order to reduce the risk of exposure to Covid for such patients. This meant putting more nurses out on the road to deliver care in residences and care homes.

This change also fulfils part of the NHS’s Long Term Plan:

“Over the next 10 years, health and care will change significantly. We have a roadmap in the NHS Long Term Plan which sets out a new service model for the 21st century: increasing care in the community; redesigning and reducing pressure on emergency hospital services; more personalised care; digitally enabled primary and outpatient care; and a focus on population health and reducing health inequalities.”

NHS People Plan 2019

Increased demands for NHS Trusts

There was a sudden increase in demand for domestic patient visits thrust upon NHS Trusts with the Covid pandemic, meaning that processes and protocols had to be drawn up and adhered to in a short space of time.

The process of planning and scheduling district nurses to carry out these additional tasks meant that a vast number of clinical hours had to be diverted to scheduling and planning. On top of that, there was the inevitable rescheduling of appointments to contend with, too.

This is a largely manual process at present for many NHS Trusts, with others relying on old software which isn’t suitable for handling the modern scheduling demands of district nursing.

Operating hundreds of nurses to fulfil thousands of appointments in an efficient and effective manner is a huge undertaking. Doing this manually requires a monumental effort on the part of those responsible and using outdated software only makes the challenge harder.

Furthermore, each appointment must also take into consideration the skillset of the nurse conducting the appointment, ensuring that they are appropriately qualified to undertake the task. This requires careful planning and oversight and was a process that could be shattered in an instant with a positive Covid test for a district nurse.

Operating this manually, simply put, is unsustainable given the hours being diverted to it, the strain of efficiently managing the workloads of every district nurse and the requirement to consider each nurse’s competency for each visit. So, there is an opportunity to implement new technological systems which will bring about lasting benefits – the healthcare world will be a different place even once Covid is a memory.

Benefits of automated planning and scheduling software for NHS nursing

Automated planning and scheduling software can bring about a multitude of benefits for NHS district nursing including:

Reducing the clinical time spent on scheduling appointments

Automating the process massively reduces the workload, leaving administrative time to focus on exceptions

Reducing travel time and expenditure

Efficiently scheduling district nurses to maximise the number of appointments they can fulfil reduces the burden on the Trust by ensuring each nurse is fulfilling as many appointments as possible

Enabling demand and capacity modelling

Identifying demand gaps and knowing exactly how many district nurses are required at any given time based on actual demand

Supporting the identification of skill gaps

Spotting skill shortages based on future demand means a proactive and accurate approach to future workforce training and recruitment can be adopted

Meeting Lone Working Policy requirements

Where staff are working alone there is the potential for them to face hostile situations; having a robust system in place enables them to raise an alarm where such scenarios arise

Meeting requirements and patient demand

Increasing assurance that service delivery is meeting the requirements and needs of patient demand through automation. Reports can be generated to see the effectiveness of service delivery and to identify any shortfalls in staffing required to deliver services in line with patient demand

Reduction in missed or delayed visits (and associated clinical incidents)

By efficiently planning rosters, travel time allowances can be factored in, lowering the risk of external factors disrupting your schedule and making it more likely that appointments are met, reducing the risk of clinical incidents occurring as a result of staff scheduling

Improved communications with patients and carers for visits

Automate messaging through your system to inform patients and guide nurses

All these benefits from a system can be used to shape a more consistent and reliable future for NHS Trusts in delivering vital services.

CACI works across the UK with community care teams who use our Cygnum software to help deliver a huge range of centrally and domestically located services, helping to keep vital care and community services running. The software is also used by the Care Quality Commission to schedule their inspection workforce.

More families forced in poverty and the impact on children

There are practical concerns around the cost of living crisis for children in and around the poverty line. Children with identified special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are far more likely to come from low income households. Some 37.2% of children who have identified SEND qualify for free school meals. 19.7% of pupils without SEND qualify.

Taking this further, 56.2% of looked after children (LAC) have identified SEND. The most common type of need for LAC is ‘social, emotional and mental health.’

In 2021, the last time statistics were published by the government on the subject, 80,850 children were LAC in England. This number steadily increases year on year, so it’s reasonable to predict that the cost of living crisis, in placing greater pressure upon families to support their children, will force many past breaking point and result in more LAC.

On top of this, 400,000 children are in the social care system. Again, in a time of social strife, it’s not unreasonable to predict a rise in this number, too.

How can our services react?

The obvious fix is money. Sadly, that’s unlikely to be forthcoming. From Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget which did so much damage to the short term outlook of the UK economy, to current prime minister, Rishi Sunak exploring tax increases and public spending cuts, it’s clear that the government will be pursuing cuts in public spending in one form or another. A report from the Resolution Foundation economic think tank suggests that the government needs to find £40bn to rebalance the UK’s finances. Social care, youth justice and education will all be affected.

So, there won’t be any more money available to services that interact with vulnerable young people. As the report in The Evening Standard highlights, concern is now spreading away from those eligible for free school meals to those in the bracket just above them. To borrow another line from that report: “Up to 800,000 children in England live in households on universal credit that do not qualify for free school meals because their annual household earnings (excluding benefits) exceed £7,400, according to the Child Poverty Action Group. This risibly low threshold — of just £617 a month after tax — is applied by the Government irrespective of the number of children in the family and mostly impacts low-income working families.”

The social interpretation of ‘poverty’, as well as the literal one, requires redefining. That’s not something that can be achieved easily or quickly, so what can be done in the here and now?

Efficiency getting the most from available services

Efficiency is one way that services interacting with vulnerable children can, simply put, provide more services to more children. This will be vital in identifying and responding to children with SEND, as well as processing information on children such as their eligibility for free school meals and uniforms.

If staff are bogged down in administrative tasks, it impacts their ability to focus on improving outcomes for these children. What staff in children’s services are best at is helping those children achieve the best possible outcomes. If admin can be left to technology and automation, where possible, this helps to free up time.

In the case of vulnerable young people, those 400,000 in the social care system as well as those 1.49m pupils (16.5% of all pupils) with identified SEND, multiple agencies will be involved in their journey.

How can shared learnings be applied across agencies? Several expert opinions will be applied to each journey, so sharing this information across agencies will help in forming a stronger, better informed opinion of each child.

Conclusion

With inflation sky rocketing, energy bills soaring and wages failing to keep pace, there will obviously be a challenging time for many people. The links between poverty and SEND are clear, though.

So too, are the links between disadvantage and activities such as County Lines drug gangs. In desperate times, the apparent carrot of an easy way out will leave countless more young people vulnerable to these types of activity. It is estimated that as many as 50,000 young people are involved in County Lines activities across the UK. The temptation to make ‘easy money’ with such gangs will only grow with the cost of living crisis.

This is another situation where data and insight will be so important. There are various estimates as to the number of children missing education depending upon your definition of missing education, but those not accessing full time education is around the 50,000 mark. This might be coincidence, but such insight is valuable in protecting and safeguarding vulnerable young people.

As such threats increase in society, services being aware of them is a significant first step in attempting to resolve them.

The number of children in poverty will certainly increase. With that, crime will rise. Pressure on education, youth justice and social workers will increase, too. The link between poverty and SEND is apparent, creating another burden on already stretched resources.

Making the best use of the resources available is paramount. It has always been important, but never more so than now.

For more information on how technology can support local authorities, schools, parents, professionals and youth justice teams in improving outcomes for vulnerable young people, please visit our website here.

Deploying modern technology systems is vital for the growth and prosperity of any modern business. They help to drive efficiency and create transparency, underpinning business growth and operations. Making reporting easy and having a holistic view of your organisation identifies areas of strength and weakness. Deciding on a technology provider, however, is almost the easy part. What happens once the contracts are signed and the technology is implemented?

Post-implementation is the most important step in any relationship. Things change, so keeping pace with that change is vital. There will be staff turnover, new business rules, external pressures and changing targets over time. To meet this challenge, it is vital that your technology can adapt and evolve to suit your changing needs.

A technology partnership

The implementation of a technology solution into your business never really stands still. Once it is adopted, getting the most from your investment is essential. Too often technology is decided on, purchased, implemented and then just left to drift as the initial excitement cedes to apathy. The way to avoid this is to have a longer-term plan that goes beyond just getting the technology live.

How will your teams utilise the technology? What will they gain from it? This is why viewing your technology provider as a partner is so important. Considering how the partnership will play out in future should be part of your roadmap. From implementation to training to ongoing support, it’s a partnership that needs to adapt and evolve over time.

Change is inevitable in any business. Your needs and requirements will shift over time, meaning that your technology infrastructure will need to be agile to your demands. Working with a technology partner that understands your business helps to facilitate the evolution of a solution.

Interoperability

Aspects such as interoperability also need to be considered. A ring fenced or unopen software solution will be unable to work with other systems that you currently use. Perhaps more pertinently, it will be unable to work with other systems that you may wish to use in the future. By working with open architecture solutions, you can get your technology solutions to work with one another to deliver a holistic solution to your requirements.

This has the added element of creating efficiency. Where systems can interact and work together, it reduces manual efforts in aspects such as reporting, since data can be gathered seamlessly from multiple sources.

Again, making a technology provider a partner means that you can develop a future roadmap of implementations with them. They can also provide help and support in developing links between their software and others that you would like to include in your technology ecosystem.

FUSION

A clear roadmap towards success helps both parties and all individuals involved in understanding what they need to input to a project such as implementing new technology. At CACI, we developed our FUSION delivery methodology to help not only your team in successfully delivering a project, but also ours in getting to understand your bespoke needs and how we can deliver a solution tailored to them.

This helps to keeps minds focussed and provide an evidence trail of desired outcomes. Post-implementation, we understand that business needs evolve. It’s therefore vital that we provide ongoing assistance to keep your investment in our technology relevant to deliver a return on it.

Ongoing assistance scheme

As part of our partnership with you, CACI deploys an ongoing assistance scheme (OAS) to book in and guarantee time between our team and yours. This helps to support ongoing development of your deployment of our software. It is also useful for completing ad hoc tasks and can cover knowledge gaps at points such as staff turnover. Our team can step in to fulfil roles, for example setting up and establishing reports, helping to take the strain off certain tasks.

The OAS days work really well for us in our ongoing use and development of Cygnum. It guarantees us time with CACI to focus on enhancing how we utilise the system. The consistency of the support makes it very easy to plan around and our point of contact, Odette, is really knowledgeable on both Cygnum and our operational needs, so it’s something that’s really beneficial for us. Odette feels like an extension of our team within CACI – we have a great relationship and it adds value to how we use Cygnum.” Norfolk First Response, Norfolk County Council

Our OAS days are designed to be flexible in terms of delivery and scope. Being booked in advance, they are offered at a discounted rate. Block booking them upfront also means that the procurement process is negated. When you need support, our team is on hand.

Using OAS days to scope future requirements is a vital step towards our customers continuing to get the most from our technology. In effect, our team members become part of your team, understanding your bespoke requirements and mapping out how we can support them.

Not only does this deliver ongoing customer success with our technology, it also aligns our strategy to yours. With a more intimate knowledge and understanding of how your business works and what your team needs to achieve, CACI can be a proactive partner.

Modern technology sits at the heart of any business. Selecting a technology provider is one thing, understanding how they can partner with you is another. Investing in technology is an expensive process, in terms of price, but also time. Getting the most from that investment will determine the success or otherwise of it. Partnering with the right provider is fundamental to realising the objectives your business needs.

For more info on Cygnum, please visit https://www.caci.co.uk/software/cygnum/

Scheduling in prisons is vital across the entire infrastructure. Scheduling officers to rotas, scheduling inmates to activities and then monitoring and reporting on all activities opens a whole new level of insight. At present, much of the scheduling in the UK prison system is a box ticking exercise based on availability. But what if it could be more than that?

Assigning staff and inmates to jobs and activities is only one side of the coin. The other is data analysis and understanding. Has the best use of an officer’s skills and experience been made? Are prisoners involved in suitable activities? What are the outcomes of the decisions made?

This blog takes a closer look at the benefits of scheduling staff and prisoners across the prison system. How can having a central system, offering a bird’s eye view of the entire network, work to the benefit of the system? How can it underpin an improvement in outcomes for everyone?

Prison officers

Fundamental to the running of any prison are the staff who work there. Understanding the skills and experience of the prison officer workforce is the first step. Having a holistic view of the officers in a single prison, as well as the wider prison network, instantly provides a view of the entire workforce.

Being able to factor in the skills and experience of a prison officer instantly means that schedulers and administrative staff can assign tasks not only quickly, but more appropriately. Randomly assigning officers to tasks within a prison fails to best utilise their skills and experiences. Different prisoner profiles require different approaches. Considering an officer’s preferences when assigning them to jobs is likely to improve morale, too. If an officer has worked closely with certain profiles, e.g. offenders struggling with substance abuse, and has experienced success in that area, it makes sense to utilise those skills and that experience appropriately.

According to statistics from Statista, the number of prison officers working in England and Wales has fallen by 3,000 since 2010. This means that it is crucial that prison officers are appropriately assigned to role. Guesswork leads to mistakes and disillusionment.

It is also an issue which the Ministry of Justice is acutely aware of. In its December 2021 white paper, Prisons Strategy White Paper, the MoJ outlines its intention to boost prison officer numbers by some 5000 by the mid-2020s. Retention is another key aspect of the MoJ’s staffing intentions, to tackle a leaving rate of 11.1% in the year preceding 30 September 2021. “Enhancing professional skills: improved training, supervision and qualifications,” is central to this.

Technology can help. Not only can it instantly match skills and experience to available roles, it can also inform the training needs of the prison guards, thereby enhancing professional skills. Mandatory ongoing training is a prerequisite, but what about expanding training management efforts to open new skills and experiences to the workforce? This has the twin advantages of increasing the skills available across the prison, whilst also offering career enhancing opportunities to staff. A deeper pool of resources across your existing workforce is useful in times of strain, something we’ve seen during the Covid pandemic.

This also ties in with creating a broader understanding of the prison population. The population is transient by nature in certain prisons. Having oversight of the profile of prisoner in the facility enables better provision of resources to their needs. For example, matching prison officers with experience of dealing with and helping inmates with substance addiction.

Prison inmates

As the focus of any prison, understanding the needs of each prisoner helps to improve outcomes for them during their sentence. What makes for a good outcome? Hopefully a successful rehabilitation of the offender. Reoffending costs some £18bn.

Management and scheduling of prison activities is central to their success. The need for demand modelling is also clear. What profile of prisoner is in the prison at a given moment, and what courses and activities are required and how will spaces be allocated? The management of this can be complex. There are staffing resources, rooms and equipment to be factored in. Activities can clash, so what’s the order of priority for a prisoner? Managing waiting lists for activities is another consideration. Then there’s scheduling prisoners, where applicable, to tasks within the prison. You need to consider the jobs they need to carry out, as well as their activities.

All of this requires careful assessment and management. Prison staff resources must be allocated to the necessary background checks and assessments. Then those staff need allocating to the activities as appropriate.

Where this can be further complicated is the need to factor in a prisoner’s attendance at court. Prisoners need to attend their relevant hearings, and, in some cases, they must be escorted to and from court by prison staff. Understanding the impact of having staff off site for such visits must also be factored into the overarching prison schedule.

Prisons must also consider external visitors. From those delivering training courses to lawyers visiting inmates, all activities and their participants need to be carefully monitored and provisioned for. Each prison has its own interpretation of the rules around visits, so a degree of flexibility is required. There is also a need to communicate visiting hours with friends and relatives who wish to visit inmates.

Key ways to improve scheduling ofprison officers

Scheduling within prisons is a complex affair. There are several moving parts and resources can be strained. Having a system in place to provide a holistic view of activities, staff and prisoners can significantly help.

Understanding the skills and experience of your staff, then matching that to the needs and profile of your prisoners can help to drive improved outcomes for all parties. Leaving this to guesswork and random scheduling based solely on availability fails to make the best and most efficient use of available resources.

A central system enables schedulers and administrative staff to instantly account for each scenario. This removes the guesswork from scheduling and auto-matches the supply of staff and their skills and experiences, to the demands of the prison population.

It also facilitates effective reporting on activities, the prison population and demand forecasting going forward. Rather than being reactive to changes and scheduling, it facilitates a proactive outlook based around supply and demand.

Automation of scheduling in certain circumstances also frees up time to focus on planning. In an environment where time is so often at a premium, this can deliver tangible benefits to the training, activities and management of a prison.

The focus, however, is always on outcomes. Improving outcomes for staff and inmates alike results in a more efficient – and more effective – prison.

For more information on how Cygnum can underpin your workforce, planning and training requirements, please visit: https://www.caci.co.uk/software/cygnum/