Cynefin Care

Tell us about how you use the Carer Wellbeing Survey.

“I’ve been using the Carer Wellbeing Survey since we started in April 2022. We promote it to all of our carers when they receive their initial app training.

“With the happiness rating I can look for trends year on year. I can see when people become unhappy. Typically that’s during the summer, when carers are under pressure to pick-up holiday cover, or during times when we’re short-staffed, as carers are again under pressure to pick-up other people’s shifts. 

“I can usually link the graph back to what’s going on in the business. But if I saw a prolonged period of unhappiness, that would prompt me to take a deeper look into how we are practising, to dig into what our care coordinators are doing. It would spark me to have more 1-2-1s and investigate what’s going on in our community.

What’s a typical happiness score for you?

“Typical scores for us are 60% of shifts ending with carers feeling ‘very happy’, 20% feeling ‘happy, with the remaining 20% of shifts ending with carers reporting they feel ‘sad’ or ‘very sad’. If that suddenly dropped to 30% happiness for example, it would signal that something is very, very wrong. 

“We had a bit of a dip in January for example, as we’d been really short-staffed over Christmas

“Having the monitoring in place means I don’t necessarily need to speak to my care team every week. I can see quickly from the feedback if things are ok or not and take action when I need to.”

Have you done anything differently since you’ve had the survey?

“The new comments feature has been most helpful. We encourage our care team to add comments - even if it’s just a couple of lines - and the number who do is growing every month.

“It’s nice to just see the happy comments - to see where our carers have had a good day and had a nice time with our customers. But I can also look at what is making people unhappy - which is often travel time and changes in medication. It doesn’t matter if the feedback is bad. You have to hear that in order to make it better.

Our carers can tell us how they feel anonymously, without any fear of persecution.”

“All the feedback comes only to me and I look at it weekly. I’ll collate it and choose carefully what I share. I use the insight to talk to our branches about how they’re doing. It’s also really useful to demonstrate during inspections to show that we are listening to our workforce.

It’s a great way for care workers to have a voice. The biggest selling point is it’s anonymous. Our carers can tell us how they feel anonymously, without any fear of persecution.”

Katie Jewell
Operations Director, Cynefin Care