Managing Change within the Care Sector
| Lighthouse Care is a private Domiciliary Care Provider based in West Sussex & is a family owned & run business. The owners of Lighthouse asked Oval Frog to assist them with a significant change process they were about to embark on which was incredibly complex & required a high degree of sensitivity & confidentiality when dealing with the 80 carers they employed at the time. There were 3 key priorities Oval Frog had the responsibility of implementing & managing for Lighthouse. The first was to reshape the way in which the company trained their care staff to make the process much more streamlined & compliant to National Care Standards whilst considering the personal commitments of the staff. The biggest challenge to overcome was training staff outside of their normal working hours so that there was not a reduction in care capacity at anytime. We worked very closely with the Senior Care staff to ensure the importance of the training was communicated to all carers & made sure we listened to feedback & took on board any barriers staff had to not being able to attend training. Through a variety of different approaches, including workshops, one to ones, shadowing & online training, we were able to produce an annual training plan for the company that the owners were happy with as well as Social Services which was very important as a large percentage of the care provided was commissioned by them. The second priority was to move from a paper based work scheduling system to a much more sophisticated Client Relationship Management (CRM) online system. Given that Lighthouse were providing over 2000 hours of care to nearly 180 clients in their own homes each week, this was a very challenging task & it was imperative to ensure that no reduction in the level quality of care occurred during the transition phase. Working with a third party CRM provider, we were able to switch systems within a week through careful planning beforehand & managed to have all the staff trained on the new system before switch over. This led to real bottom line improvements for lighthouse & through efficiency gains were able to take on extra work without the need for extra staff. Both clients & staff praised the new system & Social Services implemented the same CRM within their own care delivery department. The third & final priority was to manage Lighthouse Care through the process of buying another agency in the area & merging the two organisations into one. Through constant communication with staff & the owners, Oval Frog successfully took the new organisation through the TUPE process & increased the core care staff numbers from 80 to nearly 200 over a 3 month period. During the whole process, we kept the clients of Lighthouse constantly informed of the changes we were making & invited them to share any concerns or ideas they had for the new, improved care agency. If you would like to find out how Oval Frog can help manage change in your organisation, please email us. |  |