Cover story – advertising feature
Next-generation workforce management for social care
Steffen Wulff Petersen, CEO at Sona, explores how Sona’s £22m investment will deliver truly intelligent solutions for large care operators and positively impact the sector, and reveals what that impact looks like at Yorkshire Care Group – a supported living and residential care organisation on-track to achieving 300 per cent growth
People are at the heart of social care. Committed teams, diligent managers, experienced leaders – they all come together to support those most vulnerable. Their talent and dedication to bringing to life the concept of person-centred care cannot be understated – or replicated, for that matter. It is unique to every person in care. However, these exceptional teams have
not been supported historically by their systems to engage their skills to their full potential.
For organisations to grow sustainably,
offer excellent career opportunities, and the best care possible, they demand a state- of-the-art solution, built with the kind of technology that is not only the latest right now, but that is flexible enough to continue being state-of-the-art ten years from now and further into the future.
One success story driven by shifting cultures and the right solution Yorkshire Care Group (YCG) has experienced 60 per cent growth in its operational capabilities over the last 18 months, under the careful guidance of their visionary CEO, Angela Fletcher. Their goal is to achieve 300 per cent growth over the course of five years and they consider themselves well on-track to hit this ambitious target. YCG’s success is attributed to Angela’s focus on streamlining care processes and her team’s efforts to implement a culture of collaborative excellence – what YCG refers to as #WorkingTogether. Angela describes rolling out a next-generation workforce management solution as key to achieving
6
the former and supporting the latter: “Over the past 12 months, we have been
developing and expanding our portfolio of businesses at Yorkshire Care Group. IT and software are integral for us to be ahead of the game and to enhance and streamline our services. Having great solutions, AI, and software means we’re able to expand and support our staff to be as efficient and effective as possible. This way, the teams are not distracted by unnecessary admin tasks when delivering excellent care. Our systems and processes are so much more efficient than 12 months ago,” said Angela Fletcher, CEO of Yorkshire Care Group. Last month, Sona was awarded a £22m
investment to continue our journey towards growing this solution and helping other care providers replicate YCG’s success. More importantly, this was an investment in the development of the sector as a whole. Over the past year, demand for a next-
generation solution has increased fourfold thanks to providers looking to make their operations more efficient and reliable,
Next-generation workforce management
for social care Designing for dementia: the key principles Inclusive bathrooms for today’s needs
Volume 9 Issue 7 July 2024
www.thecarehomeenvironment.com
improve team satisfaction, and become financially sustainable organisations that can easily grow and support more people.
What does this investment mean for the Care sector? 1. Truly intelligent AI-driven solutions Ideally, social care enterprises need to forecast their staff needs based on what is best for the people they support, with maximum accuracy and automatically tailor their operations accordingly. Being able to do this will help speed up
scheduling, offer real-time views of shift runs, and encourage growth in a way that tech simply has not done over the last decade. Previously, the focus was mostly on digitising paper-based processes, but as many providers are now starting a vendor-replacement cycle, they need a truly intelligent option – the kind that was designed from the beginning to make use of AI and machine learning. Our CTO, Ben Dixon, describes this as “the technology used by WhatsApp to support going from a few thousand users to billions.” What this enables for providers is essentially trust that they can easily scale their business because their tech can reliably support it long-term: “One of the key tasks with growing is you
have to have the right processes in place … There were two elements to our restricted growth in the past: personnel and systems. [With our new initiatives] we seem to be getting more and more people wanting to join us, so that’s taken care of. And we now trust the system to grow with us exponentially, so we know that when we bring a new
www.thecarehomeenvironment.com July 2024
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51
