Making a roster to suit your clients’ needs with your available carers can be extremely time-consuming. You are coping with multiple disruptions to your schedule daily. A client might cancel a visit, or staff may be unavailable for a specific time.
Consider how many hours you spend creating a roster; time that could be spent developing and growing the business, providing quality care and gaining new clients.
How can you try to overcome the nightmares associated with scheduling homecare for all your clients and carers?
1. Digitalise your roster
By having an online, real-time roster, instead of paper timesheets, it can be easier to make changes when needed and stay on top of cancellations or absences.
Digital rosters enable you to monitor what’s happening in the field and respond quickly to situations such as absences.
2. Communicate with your carers on time and clearly
A useful by-product of digitising your scheduling process is that you can share rosters easily online. By having a digital copy, changes can be updated quickly, relieving the need for extra phone calls and causing disturbances in a carer’s daily routine.
Information flows both ways and everybody is up-to-date on the changes.
3. Record and track clients requests
Find out about client absences as soon as possible to remove any confusion or possible mix-ups with your care staff. There is nothing worse than a carer going to a client’s address to find that they are not there!
Give clients and their families more ways to contact you, and you’ll never miss a request again.
4. Get a robust care management system
Specially designed software saves significant amounts of time and stress involved with creating schedules for homecare.
Matching the right person for each client and making sure that travel times are taken into account between visits can improve the quality of care that is being delivered to those that need it.
Alerts and reports are powerful tools to help you manage; if there are late or missed visits, a notification can be sent to the care manager. Reports can help identify issues that you have in your care business and where improvements can be made.
Would you like to take a look at Nursebuddy scheduling? Find out how scheduling is made easy for you.
