South Lanarkshire Council has begun a modernisation of its Care at Home Service supported by a field service management system from Totalmobile.
It has begun to roll out the use of the software in the Hamilton locality this month, and plans to do so in Clydesdale, East Kilbride and Rutherlen and Cambuslang before the end of the calendar year. It will provide support for a mobile workforce of almost 1,000 home carers.
Historically, the service has involved planning visits and resources manually, relying on a team’s local knowledge. It was a time intensive process, and any optimisation or changes required to a schedule were made manually.
A pilot in the Hamilton locality involved scheduling jobs with Totalmobile’s Optimise, Mobilise and CareLink solutions, connecting workers in the field with the office via handheld mobile devices, and providing links to other stakeholders such as GPs and the NHS service.
Scott McNeill, service manager for registered Care at Home services at South Lanarkshire, commented: “We’d known for some time that our existing system had limited efficiency, it took one of our community support coordinators a day a week just scheduling jobs, and then inevitably changes had to be made. It was time intensive and reactive.
“The initial roll out in Hamilton for 30 carers working on 1,000 visits per week began in March and it couldn’t have run more smoothly. In fact, we went straight from pilot to live implementation with the support of Totalmobile training the workforce on its easy-to-use interface.”
Image from iStock, Slobodan Vasic
