Care for Me

What are the biggest factors that have helped your business grow to be such a success?

"Care for Me prides itself on delivering top-tier care to all of our clients, both on behalf of the HSE and privately, which allows our clients to remain in the comfort, familiarity and security of their own homes for as long as possible. Through fostering strong relationships with our clients, their families and public health nurses, we have earned a reputation as a trustworthy and reliable company.

"Similarly in relation to staff we have always endeavoured to maintain the work life balance of all our employees, as well as ensuring that the satisfaction and wellbeing of our team is always a priority. This has contributed to many word-of-mouth recommendations as an employer and as a provider of home care services.

"In addition, we have a highly experienced and reliable management team operating in our office, as well as our team of carers that are on the front line delivering the service, both of whom are always ready to deal with any challenges that may arise."

With staffing an industry-wide challenge, what strategies do you use to retain carers?

"What has helped us most with staff retention since we began using Nursebuddy has been our ability to accommodate schedule changes in the lives of our carers. Being a carer is a rewarding job, though it can be challenging at times.

"We are especially aware of this as we are in constant communication with our care team and we are always understanding of the challenges they face and we endeavour to work with our carers to find solutions that make their lives easier wherever we can. This, in addition to the carers knowing what their schedule will be weeks in advance with the carer app, means that they can develop a routine and plan their own lives much more easily.

"Staff retention for our company is at its highest since the company opened, even during all the challenges that the pandemic presented, and this is largely due to how our processes improved since moving to Nursebuddy."

What's one piece of advice you would give to someone starting a homecare business?

"The best advice that I can give is to recognise that the only real resource that you have as a care company are your staff. Fundamentally the management of their time and the care they provide is the basis of this industry.

Staff retention for our company is at its highest since the company opened, even during all the challenges that the pandemic presented.

"Ensuring that you select the right candidates that will help your company grow in the long term, finding the tools and processes that are scalable and enable you to build your business with this in mind, while also maintaining your care team's happiness and retention, is key to sustainable growth.

"This will ensure you have a strong reliable team that is able to consistently deliver a high quality service."

How has changing to Nursebuddy helped your homecare business?

"The scheduling software that we were using before, while it was functional, was very static and slow. It was limited in how many users could be working on an issue at once, took a long time to make changes and it made it difficult to respond quickly to any disruption to the planned schedule.

"That as well as the on-paper visit notes, became a bottleneck on our day-to-day scheduling workload and our client review process. Once we migrated to the integrated system that Nursebuddy provides (vastly improved scheduling, visit notes, time stamped GPS logins, always up to date care plans etc) our capacity to, and the speed at which we could, review and verify the quality of our care was greatly increased."

What is the one Nursebuddy feature that you really can't live without?

"The biggest single feature would have to be the scheduling interface as it was such a vast improvement in terms of usability and speed compared to other software that we tried.

"However, it's the integration of multiple features in one system that has been such a benefit to our company. The reduced time required to complete a multitude of tasks, and the always up to date nature of the visit notes, care plans, family portal, make it much easier to maintain our standard of care, in particular in adapting to the process changes required by the pandemic.

"The Nursebuddy scheduling process (work schedules,  preferred carers & visit flexibility, visit tasks & compliances, etc) has meant that when there have been sudden changes to our clients needs, or the availability of our carers, we are able to quickly and easily adapt, with minimal disruption, to any of the changes that are required."

Ailish Leech
Senior Home Care Manager, Care for Me