Care is always evolving. Over the past five years we have seen a notable increase in the demand for home care in the UK. The population is ageing, and people want to be able to live freely at home for longer. That is why care technology needs to evolve quickly as well. In today’s fast-paced world of home care delivery, frontline teams face mounting pressure to deliver high-quality, personalised support. Often with limited resources and fragmented tools. Traditional systems fall short, leaving carers without the context they need, struggling with poor connectivity, and relying on insecure communication methods.  

This blog explores how a mobile-first, context-aware care platform can reshape the way support is delivered.  

We’ll dive into how this innovative approach empowers carers, improves outcomes, and brings confidence back to every visit. 

Information is key to quality care. Carers, especially those in home care, are asked to wear a millinery’s worth of hats throughout their day. On traditional platforms, carers often lack visibility into why tasks are required. This can easily lead to disjointed care, creating gaps and inconsistencies in the application of someone’s plan. Which leads to missed opportunities for better outcomes. 

We work with our users to continually review and develop the functionality of our products. We are building out care tasks, interactions and assessments that link directly to care plans. Giving carers real-time context to deliver more informed and personalised support. 

The new Better Care at Home app connects each interaction to a section of the care plan. Crucially, including a client timeline for context, so that every interaction is connected. The app provides instant access to critical information, including emergency packs, allergies, and assessments. Ensuring your team knows everything they need for quality home care delivery. 

Of course, all the functionality in the world doesn’t matter if the app doesn’t turn on when you need it. Or, to borrow a phrase from my old football coach, ‘the best ability is availability’. He had a few ways of saying it in fairness, however this is the only one I feel comfortable repeating.    

Unreliable mobile signals and clunky interfaces slow down home care delivery. Which leads to frustration for your teams when they don’t have access to the things they need to succeed. Much like a certain unnamed football coach for Castletroy Rovers’s under-12s.  

The Better Care at Home app supports care wherever it happens. Whether in someone’s home or on the go. With offline access and intuitive tools that work in real-world conditions.  

Offline mode ensures carers can record and access key information, even in low signal areas. Storing the recorded information on the app and uploading it as soon as a connection becomes available. Ensuring no important interactions go unrecorded. Features like appointment views, body maps, and medication tools make care delivery simpler and faster in the field. 

We develop all our features with our users. Creating a continuous feedback loop throughout the development process. By co-producing our products, we can ensure that they are both fit for the role, and accessible to the user. 

Communication is key. It lies at the centre of all successful systems. In home care delivery, disjointed communication between carers and managers leads to missed updates and disparate perspectives. Which in turn can lead to a reliance on unsecure tools like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.  

Better Care at Home enables care teams to stay connected and informed with secure in-app messaging. Keeping your communications exclusively between your team. With built-in support that is only ever a click away. As well as a Microsoft login to make accessing the platform easier for your users. Features that promote ease of access and collaboration for every interaction.  

In-app messaging supports team to team and group conversations securely. Building connections across your service, regardless of where your team are at the time. This can help bridge the distance that naturally occurs in home care delivery. Our integrated guides and user-friendly interface help your team to quickly become comfortable using our app. Allowing for their care to evolve in line with our functionality, as they unlock more time with the people they support. As well as more information about the life that person leads and the care and support they desire. Improving access, auditability, and security for your whole service. 

As the demand for home care continues to grow, so too must the tools we rely on to deliver it. The Better Care at Home app represents a meaningful step forward. Not just in technology, but in how we think about care itself. By working with Nourish users we understand some of the key challenges providers face. Including gaps in information, accessibility issues and fragmented communication. Our mobile-first, context-aware platform empowers carers to provide more informed, responsive, and compassionate support. 

With every task linked to a care plan, offline functionality that works in the real world, and secure communication built in, Better Care at Home is more than just an app update, it’s an upgrade. A partner in delivering confident, connected care. And by co-producing with the people who use it every day, we ensure it continues to evolve alongside the needs of the sector. 

It takes a lot of hard work to make something look easy. It takes hard work and coproduction to make something easy to use. At Nourish Care we pride ourselves on the intuitive structure and accessibility of our products. We put an incredible amount of time and effort into the useability of our platforms. From concept and discovery, to prototypes, iterations and testing. At every step of the way we remain engaged with our users to ensure that our users can engage with our software. Creating a continuous cycle of feedback for us and consistently evolving solutions for our users. We are currently building a new iteration of our Better Care at Home mobile app. A process deeply rooted in and shaped by the experiences of our current Better Care at Home users.  

Every new product and feature at Nourish begins the same way. With a process of discovery. Over the years at Nourish our approach to discovery has changed and expanded. However, the focus remains on gathering as much information from as many perspectives as possible. This routinely involves sending a survey out to all of the relevant Nourish users. For example, the Nourish Better Care at Home survey was focussed on home care providers and their communities.  

We then take the responses to this survey and bring them to a multi-disciplinary team (MDT) at Nourish. This team consists of engineers, designers and researchers. They work together, guided by the survey responses and other user insights, and build a prototype. From there we move to our initial stage of testing. 

The first test we conduct on this prototype is done internally. The first steps of anything are generally best done in private after all. At Nourish, we have always been informed by the rich, first hand, care experience that exists throughout our company. We ask Nourish employees with relative experience, but who aren’t on the design team, to test the prototype.  

These tests are both moderated and unmoderated. What that means is some tests are conducted in office. While others are done privately, at home and out in the community. We trust the experience of our team members to apply the prototype honestly and earnestly. We then conduct follow up interviews to review their experience and apply that into the next stage of development.  

This initial group of testers tends to be fairly small, generally between five and ten people. Our MDT for the project then iterate based on the feedback they received. This process is led by our user experience designer. Throughout this iterative process the team routinely checks in with customer facing Nourish employees for their perspective. This includes primarily our Account Managers and Customer Support Managers. The people who most routinely interact with Nourish users and best understand your day-to-day needs. Their feedback is fed into the iterative process alongside the results of our internal testing. This ensures we keep both our users and the people they support in mind while designing and sets us up with a final prototype. Once we have this ‘final prototype’ it’s time for, you guessed it, more testing! 

The key to good design is to keep the right parties engaged throughout the process. At Nourish this means consistently involving the people using our system in the design process. For the final round of testing we return to the initial one, discovery. When conducting surveys, we include an option to sign up for the usability test of the product. These sign-ups unlock an unmoderated and quantitative research base for us to utilise. Which provides a crucial contrast to our initial testing. Where once we used a small, internal team, now we want to cast as wide a net externally as possible.  

Think of it like this, a user experience designer walks into a bar. They order a beer, they order 10 beers, they order –1 beers, they order 1000 beers. Everything works fine, they leave happily. A customer walks into a bar and asks where the bathroom is. The bar explodes.  

No internal test will ever predict everything an external user base will try with a platform. Furthermore, no internal team could ever truly predict everything a user will need. In technology generally, and in social care explicitly, there is little room for error. By testing our prototype with a wide range of users we get a much more informed picture of what it’s application will look like. 

We can review engagement to learn patterns of behaviour. Highlighting which aspects of the platform get the most use or take the longest time to complete. Crucially, it also gives us a better insight into the sentiment of the users. Not just how well did it work, but how did using the platform make you feel? All of this information is invaluable for promoting useability and a testament to the power of coproduction in care technology. 

This process has revealed several points of attention and necessary tweaks in Better Care at Home. We more clearly understood the impact and benefit of our emergency admission pack button thanks to the wealth of positive feedback received for it.  

It also shows us some areas of difficulty or navigation blind spots we previously missed in the workflow. Points like a clickable button not appearing clickable leading to user confusion. Or people feeling like a particular function should be accomplishable in one click rather than multiple clicks through several pages.  

We improve useability in our products by mapping our workflows to the mental model of our users. Repeating this process and valuing the feedback of our users sincerely is what enables us to move from iteration to intuition.  

With Nourish Better Care at Home, ultimately, what we are hoping to achieve is pretty straightforward. We want to make the new mobile app easy to use on an ongoing basis. A platform that is intuitive and adaptive, so carers can spend more time well informed and with the people they support. Delivering quality care is always going to be rewarding, but hard work, the least we can do is make the technology easy. Of course, we couldn’t do it without you. 

Learn more about our new app for Better Care at Home, and how we’re building the future of care technology with our users.

Care technology is a duality. The combination of human need (care) and digital processes (technology) is more pronounced in our sector than almost every other. At Nourish Care, we design our software to balance these two aspects, driving positive outcomes and operational efficiency. It is this approach that sets our solutions apart from the rest of the market. Nourish Rostering offers functionality that goes beyond other digital rostering solutions in both its effectiveness and its understanding. Our call monitoring and mobile app are powerful tools that empower both coordinators and carers. Our ‘Recommend’ a carer feature brings together data points to promote personal connections and our financial suite gives home care providers all the tools you need to stay in the black and on the right track.  So, you can stay on top of the numbers, needs and necessities to provide Outstanding care. 

Appointments, calls, visits, whatever name they take, wherever they happen, these are the lifeblood of home care. County councils and NHS bodies purchase 79% of home care and 96% of supported living services in the UK. Many of these contracts are determined by ‘Actual Appointment Times’, rather than just number of appointments. Digital rostering solutions are an effective way to record appointment times and Nourish Rostering gives you a range of options to definitively record and report them to your commissioner with our call monitoring.  

We offer home care providers a range of options for call monitoring. These include one time password (OTP) devices, Near Field Communication (NFC) tags, Landline and a Start/Stop button built into our mobile app. These options enable you to record not only the appointment times, but also the location of your carer when the appointment starts. This information is vital for continually improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your care. Helping you to personalise your support for your community.  

Quality home care helps people stay connected to their community, and quality digital rostering supports home care providers to do exactly that. Care comes in many forms, for many people. Home care providers need to be able to match the needs, abilities and interests of both their carers and their communities to achieve the best results. Nourish Rostering helps you to do this by optimising a variety of data points within our system and enabling you to weight them by relevancy when assigning your team to your appointments.  

These data points include travel distance, carer skills, appointment tasks, previous visits and carer and client preferences. You can then weigh these data points based on their pertinence to your unique approach to care.  

This feature is particularly useful when you need to make quick changes to your schedule. The unexpected is inevitable in home care, and you will need to make last minute adjustments to your rosters. With Nourish Rostering you can make these changes quickly, easily and confidently. Utilising the wealth of information at your fingertips to make sure continuity and quality of care is maintained.  

Of course, to be consistent with care, you need to make sure you are confident in your finances. Most standard digital rostering options focus on precisely that. Giving you an insulated schedule, that doesn’t connect to other aspects of your business. Nourish Rostering addresses this issue with our comprehensive finance suite.  

This connects your digital roster to your timesheets and invoices. Establishing a throughline for your processes and simplifying your administration. You can customise invoices with your own logo and easily export them as required. Our finance functionality also includes a time off tracker that helps you stay on top of your teams holidays. This feature is also available on your carers mobile app so they can easily review and book off work as desired.  

Our mobile app is a powerhouse of functionality for your carers, that will bring energy to your whole operation. As well as helping your carers with time off and call monitoring, it helps your team to capture the information you need on a call. This goes beyond the tasks and medication administration required.  

Our notes offer your team the chance to drive improved outcomes at the point of care. The more information you have available, the better your service can be. Our notes are easy to record and share with administrators, creating a continual feedback loop of care.  

Our mobile app includes dictation functionality, for carers on the go. This also make it easier to involve the people using your support to contribute to their care. Helping you to co-produce care that matches your unique community. 

Nourish Rostering goes beyond the basics of digital rostering functionality. Our system is codeveloped with our users, and for over 10 years has driven positive outcomes in home care across the UK. Balancing the duality of care technology to ensure efficiency never comes at the cost of human experience.  

Compliance is crucial for home care providers. Evidencing compliance is vital for care providers meeting regulations and ensuring compliance is important for providers delivering quality care. Whatever form your regulator takes, or whatever reforms they implement, it is vital you can tell your care story. Home care compliance is particularly important due to the incredibly personal nature of welcoming a carer into your house. It requires a feat of great trust on the part of your customers. A trust that is sacred to the quality of care you provide and the standard of your reputation. Any home care business looking to grow and secure new customers needs to be able to tell their care story effectively. One that shows your compliance with established regulations and ability to support your community. 

The right digital partner can help you capture your care stories and share them with all your stakeholders. This can go beyond your regulator, to your wider circles of care and community. All relationships are defined by the trust you share with each party. Nourish Care gives care providers the tools to capture all the information you need, understand it on both a micro and macro level, and build case studies that show the quality of your care.  

It is vital you capture the right information to tell your care story from your care delivery. Everyday thousands of small acts of personal empowerment are provided through home care. Don’t sell yourself short by letting them slip through your forms! With the right digital care management system you can rest assured your team is recording everything you need.    

Nourish Care records all the information from your team in real time through our app. This simplifies the process of recording, and subsequently reporting, the care you provide. Helping you to tell an accurate care story to your regulator. Home care compliance is further boosted through the audit trail capabilities of our system. This charts all actions on the Nourish platform, giving you a clear timeline of activities. Which in turn ensures care delivered can be easily evaluated to promote quality as well as the right care being delivered to meet people’s needs, wishes and preferences. 

This is particularly important for home care providers who need to report actual appointment times. We offer a selection of call monitoring options, including devices and a start/stop button on our app. This guarantees a wealth of information for your coordinator. Information including the actual appointment times and the location of the sign in, as well as capturing all of the relevant interactions that occur during the appointment.  

Each of the interactions captured during an appointment constitutes a data point. What they ate, when they ate, what exercises they did, where they went, what they drank, how they felt. Nourish automatically plots these data points for you, weaving a tapestry of information on your care delivery for you to share.  

You can use the information Nourish presents you with to identify trends. Trends that unlock a deeper understanding of your care for everyone involved with your service. Your coordinators will be able to comprehend the nature of your care on a range of levels. This provides valuable oversight whether you are a small family-run business or operating as a franchise!  

Crucially, it makes it simpler for you to be able to chart and detail your care for your inspector. Show how you engage, understand and respond to the needs of your community over time. A comprehensive, and comprehensible, overview of your service sets the scene perfectly for the nature of your care. Allowing you to then guide your inspector through specific examples and case studies to acquaint them with the day-to-day reality of your care. 

Case studies are one of the clearest ways to inform people about your approach to care. We have several of them ourselves we’d love you to check out!  

Care is not a static undertaking. Living the life you want is about having the freedom to pursue your interests. Quality home care supports people to do just that. Quality home care software supports providers to record, review and report their life-changing care. 

Nourish gives you the tools to build case studies of the people utilising your service. These case studies detail on a one-to-one level of how you wrap your service around your clients. Demonstrate the unique way you provide care to your community, illustrating how you involve people with support and their circles of care. Document appointments and demonstrate how you respond to your client’s needs as they evolve and develop thanks to your support.  

Our robust home care app makes involving people in their care decisions simple. Voice-to-text technology and note-taking capabilities means your carers can engage directly with your client’s experiences and record them in Nourish. Showing the person-led approach to care that is championed by regulators across the UK and Ireland.  

Home care compliance is more than a box-ticking exercise. It is an opportunity for you to share the incredible care you provide. Too often the true depth of care goes unacknowledged during an inspection. With the right digital home care software you can ensure that every aspect of your outstanding approach is captured.  

Regulations will continue to grow and adapt with time, just as will your service and the communities you support. That’s why it is vital you can tell your care story, utilising home care software you trust. 

At Nourish we work closely with regulators in the UK and Ireland. Learn more from the highlights of our Q&A webinar with the CQC in September. 

We must crawl, walk and then run. However, as many new home care providers know, there’s plenty to trip over on the way to full speed. The journey from start to Outstanding is filled with unique home care challenges. But with the right people, and the right systems, you can face anything. After all, success is a marathon not a sprint. When you look to your future make sure you think long term. Smart investments early in your journey can help save you time, money and hassle as your business expands.  

We’ve put together a list of the 10 most common home care challenges faced by new home care providers with that in mind.  Hopefully it can give you a little guidance when you need it.  

If you would like to talk to us directly about starting your home care journey off strong, contact us here.  

Recruitment and retention are longstanding home care challenges. In Skills for Care’s 2024 State of Care Report there was a vacancy rate of 8.3% in social care jobs. 3 times higher than the national average.  

Addressing recruitment is often a matter of retention. Providing your team with a quality work environment, good conditions and understanding is essential. Investing in your people is as important as investing in your technology. You can create a rising tide of care quality with training, engagement and advancement opportunities for your team.   

Technology can make managing and championing your teams more straightforward too. Whether utilising time off functionality to simplify rostering or eLearning to make developing your skills straightforward for your team. 

Compliance is often intimidating for new home care providers. Getting the information right for your regulator is crucial. You need to be able to tell comprehensive care stories regardless of the imperial initialism haunting your dreams.  

Care management systems support home care providers to do this by recording everything you need in one central location. So, you can not only record, but also review and report your data, for your regulator. This empowers you to tell your care story, and get the rating you deserve. 

We talk in more detail about the importance of compliance in home care here. 

Home care technology offers home care providers the opportunity to ‘future proof’ their business. But what does this increasingly popular buzzword actually mean? 

The right software can help simplify your processes. More than this, it can be used to establish your best practice in an easily replicable, and scalable way. Allowing for simpler onboarding of both new carers and people utilising care.  

A common challenge for home care providers is poor communication and information sharing. Your carers are experts in their experiences. Home care software helps providers to share this expertise and experience across your whole community. 

This includes improving communication with third parties like Local authorities and healthcare services, as well as internally. In the past poor information sharing and ‘information silos’ led to duplication of effort and inconsistent care.  

Care technology addresses this challenge by simplifying the centralisation your information and making it easier to action. 

Maintaining a high standard of care in a home setting can be challenging due to limited resources and oversight. Home care technology offers a range of solutions to address this. The best of which are fully compliant with the digital social care records standards and are listed on the Assured Solutions List. Best practice can be enshrined in your processes and ensured through your system set up.  

Functionality like remote monitoring and warnings help providers to shape and share their best practice across their service. A system like Nourish Care supports home care providers to establish their approach to care, record and review their care application, and continually improve it in line with feedback from their community. 

Home care is unique in many ways. At the core of this approach to care is the nature of appointments. Home carers appreciate the sanctity of someone’s home. Home care providers appreciate the sanctity of someone’s schedule.  

Call monitoring enables carers to record their actual appointment times. Guaranteeing accurate times and locations for appointment starts. This information is vital for reporting to commissioning bodies. It is also useful for feeding back into your own processes to refine and perfect the flow of your carers through your community. 

A schedule is never straightforward in home care. Abrupt changes and unforeseen adjustments are par for the course. Navigating these home care challenges on paper or a digital spreadsheet is incredibly difficult.  

Digital rostering simplifies every step of this process. From set up to rescheduling and reporting, drag and drop rostering systems make adjusting rotas simple. Nourish Care boasts a ‘Recommend’ feature that gathers all the relevant information you have on your carers, including travel time, skills and previous relationship with the person drawing on support.  

Ensuring that whatever spot you’re in, you can make an informed decision. 

Carer burnout is a serious and understandable concern for home care providers. Home care workers can experience stress, emotional fatigue, and physical exhaustion while carrying out their responsibilities.  

As we mentioned in the Recruitment and Retention section, understanding is essential. Digital systems can promote this understanding with communication tools, personal development support and better oversight.  

Balancing costs, invoices and timesheets can be overwhelming. Especially for home care providers who are just starting out.  

There are a number of digital systems that can help you simplify this process. Nourish for home care offers a finance management suite so you can manage payments, organise payroll, and create invoices. We also offer an integration with Sage.  

Centralising your financial processes simplifies their management. It can also help you gain a clearer oversight of your finances and help you make more informed decisions about your future direction.  

Client acquisition will always be a concern for home care providers when starting out. How do you make sure you are attracting enough clients to maintain your business? 

Well, addressing the above home care challenges is a great place to start! 

Digital systems give you better oversight of your care, promoting a deeper understanding of your community and driving improved outcomes for the people who draw on your support. Which will naturally spread the word of your care quality across private buyers and public commissioners alike.  

So, you can build the future you want for your team, your business, and your community, at a pace that suits you. 

If you’d like to learn more about building for your future with Nourish as your digital partner, contact us. 

The benefits of digital rostering go beyond efficiency. Optimisation is about more than driving shorter routes, it’s about driving positive outcomes as well. Staff scheduling is a complicated, and crucial part of delivering outstanding home care. It requires an in-depth understanding of your area, your community and your team. One that goes beyond simply managing spreadsheets. Truly great digital rostering software gives you the tools to bring all of your experience, data and empathy to bear on the challenge of staff scheduling in home care. 

A good start is half the battle, though in home care it can often feel like an uphill battle at the beginning. Nourish Rostering’s overview puts you in the lifeguard’s seat; with a clear view of your service and the insight to notice trouble before it brews too long. Digital rostering centralises your vital information. You can schedule your clients’ needs and your carers availability as desired, ensuring that every appointment is covered, and every individual involved is well informed.  

You can also fill your system with pertinent information about your service and the people who make it special. Clients can detail their needs, as well as their desires and ambitions. While your carers can include their skills, their interests and their passions. Separately these are useful silos of information, but together in one system they become influential drivers of positive care outcomes. These details can then be combined with geographic factors and clinical skills as you plan appointments and build runs to best match the needs and abilities of your care community. 

That is the core power of digital rostering and home care software. The ability to bring together a wealth of information and put it at your fingertips. Unlock the expertise of your organisation by moving all the vital information from the heads and filing cabinets of your coordinators, onto a digital format. Ensuring no hour, need or opportunity gets overlooked when you are planning your care. This can feel like an uphill engagement indeed at the start! But once crested it brings speed, and specification, to your rostering process.  

Of course, nothing in home care provision is ever straightforward. Which is precisely why home care software needs to be. Any care coordinator knows the unpredictability of a home care rota. Clients’ needs change over time, availability varies for all parties, and no one can ever be certain what awaits them just around the corner.  

Any good home care rostering software needs to be reactive. Our drag-and-drop functionality is exactly that. It gives a succinct, yet detailed, overview of your schedule for the day, alongside the ability to quickly adjust appointments as necessary. Each client’s appointments are clearly shown, as well as the availability of your carers. This gives you the tools to quickly adjust when the inevitable changes need to happen. Digital rostering includes the ability to convey these changes as necessary with your team, so no one misses out on an update. 

Crucially, you can make these decisions efficiently, with the weight of experience and the information of your system behind you. Our ‘Recommend’ a carer feature includes all relevant information on your calls so that you can send the right person to the right appointment every time. These factors include travel time and distance, specified to include mode of transport, familiarity with the client, experience and specific skills required and personal preferences of both the client and potential carers. Each data point further colours the picture of your care, and you can adjust the weighting of these points to match the unique needs of your community. Therefore you are not only planning efficiently, but effectively too, so you can continue to drive positive outcomes with your care. 

Taking care of your team is a crucial part of optimising your staff scheduling. With digital rostering you can empower and inform your carers. Our all-in-one-pocket solution gives your carers a tool that has all the information they need to manage their day. An up-to-date schedule which shows not only where they need to be and when, but travel times in between. Allowing them to plan their routes effectively and adapt to changes with ease and efficiency.  

Our new ‘Time Off’ feature helps you establish and manage your teams holiday accrual. Your carers can review and request time off through their app, promoting optimisation through centralisation of your processes.  Decisions that once took half an hour can now be resolved instantaneously. This frees up your time to focus on people and outcomes, rather than balancing spreadsheets and calculators.  

People are what drives care, and outcomes are how we measure our impact. Understanding that impact comes from understanding the way our care shapes lives. Staff scheduling plays a huge role in this, and call monitoring is key to ensuring your information is up to date and accurate when reviewing your home care rostering. Information like actual appointment times highlight the variety of key care indicators. Such as: consistent patterns in appointment length, travel times, travel mileage and more. You can record, review and report to best shape your appointments to the needs of your community.  

This information can then be combined with other data points to optimise your digital rostering. Do you need to reduce the length of one appointment? Increase the length of another? Adjust runs to balance travel time? Or maybe change carers to account for public transport variances? When you digitise your processes, you position yourself to benefit from all the data you naturally accrue. With the right software, you can take full advantage of this opportunity to improve care quality, care efficiency, and care outcomes.  

Digital rostering offers a range of benefits for your service. It lets you optimise the information you are already gathering and refine it to improve your outcomes as well as your efficiency. Time saving is a fantastic benefit on its own, and one that many care providers who are digitising their staff scheduling have experienced. However, there are far more benefits to unlock beyond efficiency. Benefits that involve everyone in your community collaborating effectively to change the lives of everyone in your community. 

‘Co-production’ is a long-standing practice and a newly minted hot topic in social care. It is based on our ability to involve all relevant people, or ‘stakeholders’ as they say in corporate meeting rooms, in the process of care design. It guarantees that the people who are utilising a care service are involved in the production of that care. An undertaking that lies at the heart of person-led care.  

If people with support, families and commissioners expect this of care providers, then it is only natural that those care providers should demand it from their software suppliers as well. 

At Nourish Care, co-production is central to our design process. It bridges our technical expertise with our user’s care experience to produce effective, efficient solutions. Our user’s input guides our development, with feature requests, feedback forms and beta testing being just some of the essential ways we keep our user’s experience central to our development.  

The latest Innovation to emerge from this process is our new ‘Time Off Management’ functionality for Nourish Rostering and Community. We know that managing rosters is one of the most demanding aspects of providing home care, for both coordinators and carers. We developed our Time Off Management feature to address these challenges directly based on extensive user feedback, advice and industry insights.  

Our new functionality is designed to simplify your time off processes, making it easier to manage leave, maintain coverage, and ensure a smooth operation for everyone involved.  

The features of our new Time Off functionality are all directly tied to the feedback and input of our users. 

Holiday schemes allow for a group of settings to be built and then applied to relevant carers. This grants customisability and flexibility to coordinators while removing the need to configure each carers holiday settings individually. You can group holiday accrual, reference periods, pay methods and more to make the complexities of specificity a simple activity. 

We found the denominator of our feature requests for time off functionality was customisability. It is the most effective way to support the varied and at times unpredictable home care provider’s scheduling needs. 

Features like year start dates for holiday accrual, carry over time settings for different time off types and pay calculations all vary from service to service, and across different governments and geographies. For example, the holiday pay reference period in the UK is 52 worked weeks while in the Republic of Ireland it is a 13-week reference period. It was vital we build these features with the freedom for our users to customise the settings and wrap them around their unique service. 

We have also included a manual entitlement adjustment for coordinators for precise control when desired. A need we discovered when talking to a lot of the participants in our beta testing phase. 

Of course, it wouldn’t be Nourish without analytics and reporting functionality as well. We have a fantastic analysis page to help administrators keep track of their carers time off. It includes a calendar view of all booked, requested and refused time off, a chart of absence types e.g. holiday, sick, bereavement, a table view of the adjustments made to their carer’s entitlement, a table view of requests, their status and the option to filter or edit them as desired. 

We built several key new time off functions into our carer app as well. This gives more insight and control to carers. With our new Time Off Management functionality carers can request leave directly from the rostering app, simplifying the process of requesting time off for a variety of reasons including holidays, sickness and bereavement.

Carers can use the app to review their remaining time off allowance and keep track of requests. We centralised all this information to further our app as the leading carer support platform in home care. Information is power for a carer on the go and with this new functionality we continue to develop our ‘all-in-one pocket’ solution. It provides an overview of their currently accrued time off and helps to make the process of defining availability and accrual more straightforward for everyone involved. 

Carers can use the app to review their remaining time off allowance and keep track of requests. We centralised all this information to further our app as the leading carer support platform in home care. Information is power for a carer on the go and with this new functionality we continue to develop our ‘all-in-one pocket’ solution. It provides an overview of their currently accrued time off and helps to make the process of defining availability and accrual more straightforward for everyone involved. 

For non Nourish users who want to learn more about our approach to co-production and working with us to support their home care service, book a demo. 

We have spent years working on our rostering system to make this as quick and straightforward as possible. Something we could only achieve thanks to co-production with our users through our beta testing processes. We spoke to Samantha Rabvu, Care Manager for TLB 24/7 Healthcare, about her experience participating in our Time Off Management beta. 

“We were paper based for annual leave requests,” explained Samantha. “Which meant someone had to fill in a form and scan it or take a picture of it. Then we were constantly just printing so I could give it to the person who’s approving annual leave. So when the offer to take part in a beta test for time off came along I just thought. ‘I don’t know what it is going to look like, but it sounds like something we could really use.’

“It offered the chance to cut out the middle man, the printing, and give power to both our carers and our coordinators. It was the chance to move to real time updates, rather than requests from a variety of platforms. In December last year we had a whole lot of annual leave requests. Honestly, we lost track of them due to the volume and variety of requests. Which was a major concern for us. So, when I saw that you were building something that could show us how many people are asking for time off and those who are already taking time off before approving any more, it was a game changer for me.” 

“I felt very involved,” said Samantha. “I could see the team was really drawing out our feedback with the questions they asked. ‘How is it going?’ ‘How are you guys using it?’ ‘Are there any adjustments we should make?’ I felt like a real partner that the things were saying were being considered. When we saw one of our suggestions in the next update it was amazing. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one suggesting it, but it was awesome.  

“We were involved throughout the process, even my team here was quite involved. Any issue that they had, they knew they could bring it to me, and I would pass it on. That way we always got things resolved.” 

“They were on it,” said Samantha, “They were on the money. It was so easy. If there was an issue, I’d send a screenshot and they were on it, we looked at it in depth, it was awesome. I had a main contact point but worked with several different members of your team. I just knew that they were there. They had our back, no matter what.  

“They are awesome, friendly, approachable, and we could rely on them 100%. Even the way bad news came was awesome. When something wasn’t ready, we always knew that it was still in development, it’s just not ready yet. We understood because of the communication, and we trusted your team.” 

“We’re on the right track,” said Samantha. “This was a great starting point for me. It was fantastic. Even though I was a little unsure at the start, digital wise, this isn’t something i had a lot of experience with. The process helped us to develop skills and tactics on how to navigate the rest of the digitalization roadmap, which is great.  

“So, I’m hopeful. I’m looking forward to it, it’s exciting, because I feel involved in the process. I feel like we are growing with you, and we can build something great together.” 

The future of social care will be shaped by co-production throughout the entirely of our sector. Lived experience, collaboration, data sharing, all fold together under the guiding philosophy of teamwork and community. We received over 150 feature requests for more advanced time off functionality. Which was the starting point of our development cycle, and a continuing example of our approach to digital social care solutions. 

We still have a long way to go, and we are very excited about the journey. Why don’t you join us? 

Home care software is baked into the future of social care. We witnessed a huge increase in the uptake of digital systems across social care over the past 3 years. A change accelerated by government policy and funding. This considerable uptake brought with it a range of advantages and benefits for care providers. For example, digital rostering systems like Nourish help providers to simplify processes, reduce administration times and record more detailed information. With digital systems becoming commonplace in social care there has never been a more urgent time to switch to Nourish. Admissions for the funding available through Integrated Care Systems will close at the end of November. Even for those providers who are still getting up and running choosing the right digital rostering system is crucial for many reasons. 

Nourish gives you the tools to take full control over your home care administration. This means more than rosters designed for simple and swift use. It means a robust system compiling the wealth of data your teams naturally gather to provide you with a clear overview of what is happening in your community.  

With Nourish you can schedule your carers and clients up to four weeks in advance. Repeating these schedules with ease to improve consistency across your service. Of course, as all home care administrators understand, nothing ever goes totally to schedule. Nourish home care rostering is designed with drag and drop functionality that makes changing your schedule on short notice easier than ever. Our home care software includes a ‘recommend a carer’ feature that is scored based on a range of data points you choose and weight. Such as: familiarity with client, travel to appointment and relevant skills for the appointment’s tasks. So, you can adjust quickly, decisively and with confidence. 

Digital rostering offers benefits beyond simplifying existing paper processes. Nourish Rostering and Community unlock a range of features that put new innovations and fresh information at your fingertips. Call monitoring is a straightforward way to record actual appointment times. Nourish includes geographic location and a range of electronic call monitoring options to suit your needs. Care providers, especially those with local authority and council contracts can attest to the benefits of a robust call monitoring system. 

Crucially, with a quality home care software like Nourish, you can access data at a level previously unattainable with paper. This data is easily presentable and evidencable in trends and reports. You can track different factors regarding your team and community to give you a more detailed overview of your service. These details, like travel times and medical administration, can be fed back into your service to drive positive outcomes. As well as acting as informative evidence for your regulator. 

Nourish home care software supports care providers across your service. Home care requires a great deal of administration and organising. Beyond the design of schedules and care packages there is the crucial matter of making sure everything is in order, and everyone is properly paid. This can be quite daunting for people when they are just setting out their new home care service. Especially those less familiar with operating a business.  

Our invoicing and timesheets are a simple way for you to organise your payroll. You can use Nourish to set specific pay rates and charge rates, to match with the responsibilities of your teams and the services they provide. Our home care software includes comprehensive time-off functionality. Allowing you to set the rate at which holiday is earned, and for your team to manage and request leave through the Nourish home care app. 

Big changes are rarely simple. But with the future of social care coming at us at its current speed, now is the simplest time to do it. The best home care software comes backed up with a human team. People who will work with you to make sure you get everything you need from your system. At Nourish we pride ourselves on being person-led and community-centred. We are incredibly excited about the future of social care, and we’d love to share it with you. 

If you want to find out more about working with Nourish book a demo! 

Time is running out to get funding for Digital Care Records in home care! The Adult Social Care Transformation Fund is available to help care providers move away from paper-based admin and digitise their social care records. It is a key part of the government’s push to have 80% of social care providers using digital social care records by March 2025. However, the deadline for new applications is the end of November 2024.

There is a concentrated effort to align health and social care in the UK, with digital systems playing a fundamental role, as outlined in the 2021 white paper Integration and Innovation.

Implementing a digital system, or going through ‘digital transformation’ as it is more commonly posed can be intimidating. But the benefits are worth the investment. Digital systems can streamline your service, reducing time spent on admin and providing you with previously unavailable insights of the care you provide. There is never enough time to do everything in social care, but digital systems can help you to focus on the things that really matter to your community.

Money makes the world go round. It’s a simple fact, one that is felt keenly in home care. For many providers, digitisation was just another ‘nice to have’ aspect of care provision they could not justify in their budgets. This has since changed as more and more care providers digitise their processes. It is clear the government is moving towards digitisation in health and care, making digital social care records a ‘need to have’. 

Fortunately, funding is available to any CQC registered care provider who has not used a digital social care record before. The funding is provided by your local Integrated Care System and the approved list of digital suppliers can be found on the Assured Solutions List. While funding varies between ICSs it generally covers 50% or more of your first year licence. 

“The Adult Social Care Transformation Fund has been a great enabler for providers as they embark on their digital journeys”, explained Nourish Care’s Head of Partnerships, Denise Tack. “The funding alleviates the initial up-front implementation costs of going digital. It allows providers to rapidly gain access to essential care delivery tools such as GP Connect and eRedbag. Being able to carry a care plan in your pocket is highly transformational. Most of our customers tell me they could never go back to paper!”

At Nourish we are well-versed in supporting care providers to succeed in gaining this funding, and our experience can help make all the difference when working on the reduced timelines new applicants now face. We have helped providers across all of the ICSs and we would be happy to help you too. Reach out to us with your postcode and we will give you the relevant contact details for your local ICS. 

Once you have reached out to your local ICS they will send you a form to fill out for funding. We are on hand if you need advice while completing the application form.

It is important to note that in order to be eligible for funding care providers need to be CQC registered to support adults, be DSPT compliant, have NHS mail and be currently using paper.

We have written previously about the benefits of switching from paper to digital processes. Digitisation impacts social care. Both at its fundamental level of point of care, as well as its regulatory level of decision-making. The future of a more integrated health and social care system lies in digital processes. Information sharing brings us closer together without sacrificing our privacy. Digital social care records are at the heart of that. And with the right funding, the right system, and the right support, you can be too.

Want to find out more about the funding or have any questions answered?

Reach out to us at hello@nourishcare.com, call us on 023 8000 2288 or book a demo of Nourish here.

The Home Care Association Conference is a special event for home care providers. It brings together Association members from across the UK to share the experiences and insights. This makes it a unique opportunity to meet with a wide range of providers, suppliers and key decision makers in home care. We have been eagerly awaiting this opportunity to connect directly with the home care sector and show everyone why we’re so enthusiastic about Nourish Community.

The theme of this conference was ‘The Future of Homecare’, something we at Nourish Care are very excited to be a part of. The day certainly lived up to its billing. Politics, commissioning, and workforce development were just some of the topics we covered, and thanks to the openness and understanding of the attendees there was plenty of positivity to take back home with us. 

The Home Care Association is the premier organisation for home care providers in the UK. Its members include providers of all sizes and locations, and their conferences bring these members together to great effect. Home care can at times feel like the ‘little brother’ of the ‘little brother’ in social care, overlooked and underappreciated. 

We know the reality is far from the truth, as demand for home care continues to grow year on year in the UK. People want to be able to live long, fulfilling lives, in their own homes and communities. We relished the chance to speak to so many amazing providers about exactly how they can help the people who utilise their services achieve this ambition. These discussions are crucial to both our understanding of the realities of providing home care, and the future developments we prioritise for our own system.

The big attraction for events like ‘The Future of Homecare’ are the talks. The headline acts if you will, ready to light up the stage with their passion and perspective. We kicked things off with a bang this year as the HomeCare Association’s CEO Dr Jane Townson OBE was joined by Strategy Governance and Policy Consultant Dr Anna Dixon MBE. Dr Dixon recently chaired a Church of England Commission on ‘Reimagining Care’, drawing upon her wealth of experience which includes being the Chief Executive of Ageing Better and Director of Strategy and Chief Analyst at the Department of Health to name just a few of her previous roles. The talk highlighted the deficit of awareness around social care and the fact that we still lack enough ‘political salience’ to bring about much needed reforms. Work is being undertaken to try and address this issue, especially by fantastic organisations like Social Care Future but a lot of effort remains ahead of us. 

The other talks followed a similar trend of practical insight and experience being combined with actionable results. ‘Commissioning for Better Outcomes’ was a fascinating panel delving into the challenges of commissioning. Thea Stein, CEO of Nuffield Trust revealing a long held suspicion for many in the room that ‘The NHS does not understand Social Care…we are working through it but it is very slow’. Tim Ryley, Accountable Officer for NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board shared some tips on connecting with your local ICB as a care provider, finding the right contact and the benefits of going through the Place Committee where possible.

The talks on the future of caring and workforce were similarly dappled with actionable advice. A particular point of interest for us was when George MacGinnis, Healthy Ageing Challenge Director for UK Research and Innovation pointed out that; “Tech can be complicated and designed at care providers rather than with them.” An important lesson for all suppliers and one that speaks to the mission statement at the heart of Nourish Care. 

The Home Care Association Conference is not just about coming and listening, but about taking part so you can be sure to take something back home with you. The morning and afternoon workshops covered a wide range of topics and offered something for everyone. Perhaps too much at times as it was difficult to settle on which workshop to attend!

Business growth, financial management, technology applications, recruitment, retention and PR were all up for discussion. These talks were led by people who had an in-depth understanding of the topic, but driven by the participants. The interactive sessions further reinforcing the engagement and community that makes being a part of the Home Care Association so worthwhile.

Our team feels energised by our time at The Kia Oval and ready to embrace what the future holds for home care. We could spend thousands of words going through all of the great insights, conversations and people from the conference. (Not to mention the food, quite a spread) However some things you have to experience yourself to truly appreciate and ‘The Future of Homecare’ was certainly one of them. So make sure you don’t miss out on next year, because we can’t wait to go back!