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.  

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. 

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!