Westmorland Homecare
Russell Crossley, Director
Human connection uniquely defines social care. When care providers like Westmorland Homecare talk about core values and philosophies they are tightly bound to the people, the human beings, who shape their care, both those who provide it, and those who utilise it. The digitisation of social care processes intensifies this dynamic, as finding a digital partner that aligns with your service becomes crucial for maintaining quality care and supporting your team.
Franchise size increased five fold
Westmorland Homecare joined CarePlanner in 2018 seeking a digital partner rather than just a solution. A team that reflected their own perspective and values for home care, and would facilitate their plans for the future, while growing alongside them. Westmorland Homecare Director Russell Crossley explains why they chose CarePlanner, and how successful it has been.
Aligning Values and Needs with Westmorland Homecare
“Our slogan would be living your life to the fullest,” explained Russell. “It’s all based around the core values, the cornerstones of our business. Our core values are to be kind, innovative, trusted, and enriching, and our philosophy behind care is we don’t want to just say person centred care, it’s a very generic term and not it’s picking up on where traditionally care has failed. We’re looking at how we can improve not just for the lives of our clients, but also the lives of our staff too.
“Our core values form the principle of every decision that we make. For example, when it comes to recruitment, we look for personality rather than skills. You can teach the skills that people need, but you can’t teach a person how to care.
“It’s very similar in the approach to software. But the software element also has to be able to solve the issues that we face as a business. So when thinking of everything from a matching standpoint, based on our core values, but then also looking at everything from a solution based standpoint is what issues do we face and does this provider solve our issues?”
Making the Decision
Digitisation is one of the most important decisions providers make in today’s social care landscape, and they shouldn’t rush it. To find the right partner for your service, it’s crucial to get to know both the systems and the teams behind them.
“There were lots of people that we went to go and speak to,” continued Russell. “We were still trying to decide on what software we should go with, fundamentally and then forever. Because again, it’s all about building relationships, and we had a really, really good chat with the people at CarePlanner. They were like; ‘look, we’re happy to allow you to lead us in what area we should be looking at improving on’ and we love that, we love the communication. We love that if we ever had any queries or ever needed support we get almost instantaneous support with CarePlanner, we’ve never really had that before.
“We love the communication. We love that if we ever had any queries or ever needed support we get almost instantaneous support with CarePlanner, we’ve never really had that before.”
“When we’re speaking about care, [your] people understood what we were trying to put across, and then [CarePlanner] try to implement those updates. The system is very clean as well, it’s a very formal looking, very easy to use system, once you get the hang of it.
“In terms of learning the system it’s quite easy, people are there at the end of the phone.
I think that the idea behind having account managers who actually know their accounts and speak to them. It makes it really easy for us to call and ask those quite stupid questions sometimes.”
Once Westmorland Homecare was set up on CarePlanner and supported by our teams they were ready to take the next step as a provider and extend their outstanding care beyond their immediate community.
Opening Multiple Branches
Over the past five years Westmorland Homecare has gone from strength to strength thanks to their incredible team and commitment to their core values. They have increased the number of franchises from 1 to 5 in the past five years, an expansion that CarePlanner was able to support and simplify significantly for them.
“It was quite easy,” Russell said. “It was great when we opened locations number 2 and 3, and we’re just about to open numbers 4 and 5. I contacted CarePlanner and said, ‘Look, I basically need to replicate the system that we have at Kendall…to ensure that we all work in unison.’
“CarePlanner said ‘yes, leave it with us.’ After logging on, all the settings were identical, therefore, there was no interruption in business. This was crucial because we have one plan, one set way of working. Unit formality is extremely important to us. It’s the core of every single thing that we do.”
The Power of Data and Long Term Planning
This uniformity has enabled Westmorland to improve upon a number of their processes. They have also been able to further improve the quality and longevity of their care by utilising CarePlanner’s reporting suite and management functionality. These simplified and effective applications of our system helped Westmorland achieve their incredible five ‘Outstanding’ CQC ratings for each of their branches.
“We do generate lots of different types of reports,” said Russell. “We’re quite a data driven company, as much we’re a very personable and kind and loving company. I think the success of the business and people’s standards of care is ultimately driven by the data that we get. With CarePlanner we’re able to get data for pretty much anything that we need, which is very, very good. It also gets a very accurate forecast for the month, which nobody else can do.
“I think that’s probably the biggest point with CarePlanner is the fact that it allows you to plan long term and forecast what’s going to happen”
“[With] financial forecasts, we’re able to very accurately assess what the branches individually go into, and turnover for that month, again, allowing us to plan for the next month.
“I think that’s probably the biggest point with CarePlanner is the fact that it allows you to plan long term and forecast what’s going to happen. Having everything central to one piece of software has proven so much more essential to us. We have used other apps in the past, for booking holidays for example, we’d have to use a different system or to generate timesheets, we’d have to use a different system. CarePlanner literally allows us to do all just from one system. That allows us to be much better organised. Therefore we can assess what our current staffing levels are, where we have clients on, where we currently have the availability for clients. That’s not something we’ve ever had before”
A Partnership for the Future
Westmorland Care is a standard for excellence in care in their communities. A standard rooted in their core values and expressed in each extension of their service. They have managed to balance the power of data with the humanity of understanding to create a long lensed and close knit community, one that we at CarePlanner are both privileged and proud to play our role in.
“The team is sensational,” concluded Russell. “It’s nice for us as a company to see other other companies having a bond like we do as a company, you have that family feel. We very much thrive on that family feel. CarePlanner allows us to have an open ended relationship, whereas a lots of companies have quite a robotic support system to go through that never really seems to work.
“Careplanner has grown, as we have grown, and that’s really nice to see. Usually as a company grows, they tend to move more and more away from the people and their customers. [CarePlanner] haven’t. To be able to retain those relationship building blocks you’ve always had is great.
“You listen to the question that we have and go; ‘right, we’re gonna jump on that system. We’re gonna have a look at it and we’re gonna see if we can help you fix it.’ That is literally everything to us.”
If you’d like to learn more about how CarePlanner can work with your service you can fill out our contact form here: contact us page or by calling 0117 214 0125.
