Joy2Care is a family-run home care provider built on a simple but powerful philosophy, clients become extended members of the family. At Joy2Care, relationship-centred care means treating every person with the same warmth, respect and attention they would expect for their own grandparents. That family value extends across the whole service, through every carer and into people’s homes. 

Joy2Care’s journey with Nourish began over 10 years ago, when rotas were still written on paper in the back garden of the founder’s home. Notably separate from the people they cared for. Since then, Nourish has become central to how they deliver person-centred care, improve their operations and keep connected with clients, care teams and families. Bringing together familial commitment and commercial acumen to deliver quality, sustainable, care for their community. 

Joy2Care have wrapped Nourish around their service. Nourish Better Care at Home supports first-person care planning, gives families greater visibility through the app, and helps their team communicate clearly and precisely. It has also transformed their financial management, reducing a manual invoicing process that once took weeks down to days, with estimated savings of around £18,000 a year. 

We spoke with their Director of Operations, Josh Farrell, to learn more about how Joy2Care utilise Nourish Better Care at Home to improve oversight, reinforce connections, and build for the future. 

The Joy in Joy2Care
The family approach to home care 

Centralisation
The oversight and key perspectives that support quality care 

Communication
How Better Care at Home connects their teams, clients and community and supports their operational sustainability 

Finance
The digital switch that saved Joy2Care around £18,000 annually 

Operational Sustainability
Utilising Better Care at Home to best understand the demands of their community and supporting them effectively with their teams 

“Well, without sounding really cringy, we’re a family business. So, everyone we work with, all our clients become extended members of the Farrell family. That is how it is. 

“I’ve always felt when it comes to supporting people, it’s how you expect your grandparents to be treated. Now, admittedly I’m a bit of a cheeky chap, so I love to have a laugh and joke with them all. That’s because, at the end of the day, they do become like our family members.  

“The family values extend to our care staff as well. We only hire people who match our values. I would rather do all the work myself if it means getting the right carers in with the right beliefs. We’re going to look after vulnerable clients in their own homes, you must be the right type of person to be able to do that the right way.”

“That was a decision I made about 10 years ago. We used to do rotas on pieces of paper in the back garden of my mum and dad’s house! That’s back when the business was not that old. I wanted us to improve our approach. 

“I looked around at our options for a digital partner. Talking with Nourish, and seeing what your system could do, made it an easy choice. We did check out the competition at times, but we always come back to Nourish. We love building with Nourish over the years, tailoring the system to our unique needs.  

“These days I don’t need to talk to anyone else because I know what I’m getting with Nourish, a genuine partnership, that’s what I like.” 

“It just increases the person-centred care side of things through everything. That’s what we’re really big on. We write everything in first person. It’s not ‘Josh is doing this’, it’s ‘I like to’ and ‘I decided to’. Better Care at Home helps us to deliver that even more and become more efficient with everything we’re doing along the line. 

“Working with Nourish always feels person centred too. It’s not a one size fits all approach, or at least it doesn’t feel that way. It genuinely does feel like someone’s built a bespoke system for my business. Which I suppose we have done together, over the years, as part of working in partnership with Nourish. I’m certainly a big, big advocate.”

“Better Care at Home is fantastic for centralising all our information. I can come into the office on a Monday and I can check through everything I need then and there. I used to have to drive around and pick up files and client’s notes back in the day!  

“On Better Care at Home everything we need to know to support our clients is in one place. That centralisation of information makes a huge difference to the quality of care we can provide, in a way that supports the personal, familial connections that define our approach to care.  

“Which makes life so much easier. We’re not clicking through everything and then forgetting what you clicked on and having to backtrack through different systems. I can just go where I want straight away, and I can review what I need straight away.  

“I don’t need to be in the office either, which is so important with home care. I’ve done it on my laptop and on the phone when I’m out and about. I can just log on and see everything. Rather than relying on phone calls and WhatsApp messages I can see firsthand that everything is running smoothly. 

“It’s the same with my own holidays. I know you’re supposed to unwind, but we’re a family business, you do check everything. With Better Care at Home you can do that straight away. That level of oversight speeds up our whole business, as it simplifies my communication with our managers. 

“It’s really good to see it from our side of view, but also from the client side of view as well.”

“It’s brilliant, it makes it so much smoother for keeping people connected and informed.  

“I’ve had some really good feedback from family members of people utilising Joy2Care. The daughter of one of our clients went on holiday recently with her friends. While she’s on holiday she logs into the app to check in on everything. Her mate is blown away, asking her ‘Wow, what’s this?’ So she takes her through it. Two weeks later, her mate is calling us, asking us to assess her mum based on what she saw on holiday! 

“So that’s helping us both improve connections through our service and expand our business!”

“Communication is crucial for quality, and the communication in Better Care at Home is great. It’s a big focus for us. It’s key to any business being successful. 

“It’s about good communication, not just talking for talking sake. The same is true for digital communication. It needs to be clear and precise. That’s what Better Care at Home’s communication features are like. It’s focused on what you want to talk about, and just helps you move on with everything.”

“Our team really like it. We have introduced a lot of the different functions in the system over the past few months. We realised a while back that we weren’t utilising everything we could on the platform. 

“Over the past few months, as we’ve gotten more comfortable with the new features, we’ve been utilising a lot more on the system. We’re just getting more and more used to it, and everyone seems to really like it.”

“The invoicing is fantastic! The finance functionality in general. Especially from my perspective as that’s my side of the business. At Joy2Care we used to do invoicing manually, in quite a convoluted way. We’d count it all up, put it onto a Word document and so on. That used to probably take about two-three weeks, solid time, to get all invoices sent out. 

“Since I moved that process over to Nourish it takes two days. The total savings for us are about £18,000 a year by just moving over the invoicing. It makes the whole process so much smoother, and transparent.  

“It’s particularly useful for client feedback as well. It’s so good because you get the breakdown of all the things. And what I like as well is what we used to have as a problem. People would call in to make a payment and it would all be on a spreadsheet. If a senior manager wasn’t immediately available manager wasn’t immediately available. 

“Now, because it’s on the system, they can explain it directly. Nourish shows your invoice is £2,500, here’s why. It’s great to have that resource and tick everything off easily.  

“The reporting side of things is also great. It simplifies my life by making it easy to see how much money is outstanding. I can check what’s owed and who’s owed it, resend out the invoices where necessary. We can even track our emails. So, when people go, ‘I’ve not received the invoice’ I can load up Nourish and review the email, where it was sent and if it was opened. This helps us keep our communication effective and transparent.

“The level of financial savings, control and insight Better Care at Home brings to our service helps us prepare and build for our future sustainably.”

“We also use the system to review how many care calls, care workers and so on when planning rotas.  

“There’s so much useful information captured by Better Care at Home that we can take into account. Things like the functions where you can look about how many late appointments we’ve been to. I always have a look at that and then talk to my team about rostering. ‘I can see we’ve had this many late appointments, what’s the reason?’ ‘How can we solve this issue?’ It’s always good now.    

“It’s helped me learn about how many carers workers I need, and when I need them. I can see our low demands times, and I can plan more effectively for late shifts. Each day I know how many carers I need. I know whether they are walkers or drivers, I know everything and that’s helped me so much with our operational planning. I used to spend hours building those kinds of reports on our back end. Better Care at Home makes it all so much easier to understand.”

“I love working with Nourish. Every time I’ve needed support, or guidance you’ve been there.  

“For example, a big part of us saving so much money with invoicing came from the support and guidance of your team.  

 “That’s why I won’t leave. You’ve been so good with us, like a member of our extended family.”

Care and support come in many forms. A tapestry of individual threads, rich in the colours of the dreams and ambitions in each community. St Anne’s Community Services understands this potential, as they provide a range of services unified by a single vision. To live a life without limits, by making a difference every day. Their commitment to this vision is what makes them one of the North of England’s leading charities.   

Their support covers a wide range of areas, including nursing, care for people with learning disabilities, physical disabilities, homelessness, substance use, alcohol detox, safe spaces for women and mental health services. This support primarily takes the form of outreach day services, emergency accommodation, supported living and residential services. All underpinned by their philosophy to try to reduce any limits they can in terms of people doing what they want to do with their lives.  

St Anne’s know they need to evolve with the needs of their community to achieve their vision. That’s why they are launching a new strategy for supporting lives without limits. Having chosen Nourish Care as their digital partner over a year ago, they were well acquainted with our approach to care and support technology. That’s why when looking for a system to help them with their incident management, they chose Nourish Safety. We spoke with their Director of Operations, Lyndsay Atkinson-Swales, about their new strategy, why they chose Nourish Safety, and how their rollout progressed.  

Looking to the future 
The two key focuses of St Anne’s new approach 

Championing people 
Lyndsay explains why St Anne’s chose Nourish Safety as part of building their new systems approach and move away from disjointed workarounds 

All on board 
How St Anne’s used ‘nudge theory’ to help their team understand and utilise the benefits of Nourish Safety 

Ease of use, excellence of impact 
The benefits of Nourish Safety being felt across St Anne’s teams 

Data-driven decisions 
How Nourish Safety helps surface important information, and inform more effective support 

The future 
Why St Anne’s are so excited about what’s still to come 

“Absolutely, there are two main things we’re working on. The first is trauma-informed care. We want our teams to understand, not what’s wrong with people, but what’s happened to them. Their ‘why’. Why they may communicate, respond or behave in a certain way. We’re trying to focus less on risk assessing and more on safety planning in terms of risk assessment in itself.  

“If I said to you, ‘I’m going to do a risk assessment on you’, you might think: ‘Of what? What am I a risk to?’ It’s not the kind of terminology that you’d want to take into a modern social care world. But if I said, ‘Should we create a safety plan so we can support you to remain safe?’ That’s a different conversation. It’s a different way of approaching care and support.  

“The other avenue we’re going down in our new approach is co-production. Which is something that’s been around forever. But doing it well.  What we don’t ever capture is the ‘why?’. The outcome really is the ‘why?’. Why does that person want to do that? There’ll be practical reasons why, there’ll be emotional and psychological reasons why.

“But we can shy away from that in social care, especially in care planning. We can become too prescriptive. We want to understand context better, and that means making better observations and understanding the ‘why?’ behind people’s actions and goals.” 

“Nourish Safety is a big part of our approach because it factors into our new operating model. We want to move away from the registered manager being the be all end all of responsibility and accountability. Don’t get me wrong, they are, but in social care we always see roles and responsibilities bleed into each other.

“One of the drives behind my role as our director, and why I wanted to bring Nourish Safety in is because I’m always asking: ‘How can I make it as easy as possible for the managers to run their services? I don’t really want them to be registered managers. What I want them to be is quality of life delivery managers.

“I don’t want them to be focused completely on governance and compliance. Yes, that keeps people safe, but it also settles for just letting people exist. I want them to have as much time as they possibly can to teach the staff how to coach, mentor and enable the people we support. If they’re just running around with audits doing compliance, it can lead to focusing on the wrong things. Then their job becomes very task-focused, instead of people-focused.

“Nourish Safety helps with our processes and helps keep our team on track with what they need to do. While allowing them to also use the flows and the information to do that learning piece in a way we haven’t been able to before. Previously, we were using a mix of Excel sheets and online documents. Having it all in one easy-to-action place is a game-changer.”

“A big factor for us is the way Safety is embedded in Better Care. All of this functionality being in one system is a huge benefit. No one is scrabbling around to find the information they need. A system is a big part of a culture, isn’t it? We’ve all used systems where we think, ‘Goodness, this is frustrating’.  When we brought in Nourish Better Care our team adapted to it quickly.

“We started with a big project group of over 30 people. Managers who could become Nourish champions within our service. They taught all their peers, which made it a very organic rollout. We took the same approach with Nourish Safety.

“When I introduced the idea of Nourish Safety, it was before I’d even made a business case for it. I went through the system with each of our management teams to ensure engagement. We made sure we wanted the system, that we knew how it would help us.

“Our managers really bought into the potential of Nourish Safety. It’s a system where we can document everything we need in one place. It’s in specific flows that we can match to our new strategy. It makes admin simple and gives us more time to focus on what matters to us. Once our managers saw Nourish Safety, they became a big driver for its adoption!”

“It was quite straightforward; config only took us about 3-4 weeks. We went live across 150 locations on the same day, talk about a big bang! 

“It’s been very easy because we got everybody on board. I know it sounds a bit cliché, but they genuinely are. We focus on the positive impact and elevating them.  

“From the beginning, we explained how Nourish Safety is something that will completely help you in your roles and here’s why. If you explain something to somebody in context and how it’ll benefit them, it’s a lot easier for them to get on board. 

“It’s our application of nudge theory. We know no one reads blanket emails; it’s simply not an effective way for us to reach our frontline roles. That’s not the arena they operate in. Instead, we cascade information through people. 

“We did webinars. I went to managers meetings to go through it with them. We explored the flows and what we needed to record. I gathered feedback from the managers and made sure everyone knows this is a very much a system for operations.  

“As an operations team, we haven’t owned a system before. So, we’re really embracing that and embedding it into our culture. Which means on every single visit there’s a question on how we use Nourish. 

“‘How are you using Nourish Safety?’ ‘Is there anything we can help you with?’ They all come back to me. I take them to the Nourish project lead. She goes straight back to the service and completes that loop. We want to give feedback so our managers know that anything they’re bringing to us, we act on straightaway. It’s just continual like that, really. It’s a continual conversation.”

“I was recently visiting a St Anne’s service. A new hire was making notes on his device, so I asked him to show me his workflow. He wasn’t following the correct flow, so I offered to show him the right way. It took about two minutes to go through it.

“He did a test and it went perfectly. He was delighted with the success, and I went around to all the other team members in that service. It took me about 15 minutes and by the time I’d left, everyone is using it. I put together a quick case study with some screenshots and sent it to all our employees.

“We received really positive feedback in response. It’s that nudge approach. It’s got to be through many different methods to ensure you’re reaching everyone in a way that resonates. To do that you’ve got to be all on the same page. That’s something Nourish Safety really helps us achieve. It simplifies our workflows and makes it easier for us to share best practice. All of which support our vision of getting people to live their life without limits.”

“Our teams found Nourish Safety very easy to use. Once they know that they’ve got to click on that down arrow and go to the incidents it’s simple. Everything flows together between Better Care and Safety. We mapped out our process from the start and that’s key. If you can map out the process simply, people understand and get on board. 

“Our support workers really like how quickly they can raise incidents now. The escalations work really well. Which then saves time for our managers on a wider scale by simplifying the whole process.

“The Positive Behavioural Support (PBS) team have got all the information instantly as well, improving our ability to respond to behaviours that challenge. They’re finding it so useful to get to go straight back to managers, instead of waiting for a referral.” 

“The more steps I can remove for our managers by using Nourish, the more everyone in our community benefits. It means our managers can spend more time doing what they need to do with their teams, and our teams can more effectively support the people utilising our service to live their lives without limits.”

“Nourish Safety gives us so much more context. When we were putting data into Power BI for our previous incident reports, it was difficult for us to see it on a personal level. Whereas with the current dashboards, especially the behavioural ones, we’ve been able to very quickly identify factors that we hadn’t identified through our previous data polls. The dashboards are more intuitive, and you can see things from different perspectives depending on your filters.

“Now we can quickly notice trends and respond to them. For example, one person we work with has a lot of ligature incidents, which can be quite distressing. Through the prompts from Nourish Safety and the workflow, we’ve been able to see a pattern emerging in their actions. This enabled us to establish better communication with their Multi Disciplinary Team (MDT). We have more detailed information, and can share it with them quicker, which improves the treatment the person using our service receives. We’re seeing these incidents reduce as a result and that is a positive experience for everybody.

“We can access information and share it quicker because of how the escalations work in Nourish Safety. The detail and workflow are game changing. With the email pulling through the escalation, the severity and the incident type. Then filtering it to the relevant levels of the organisation and departments, our people were able to coordinate our approach quicker.

“Prior to Nourish Safety that person was on about 120 incidents of ligature a month. Last time I checked the dashboard that had come down to 30. Which is an incredible development on their journey to living a life without limits.”

“Excellent, I couldn’t ask for more. I think it doesn’t matter who I interact with at Nourish, I always feel that you all believe in your vision and that’s important for me. It feels to me that what you say you’re doing, you’re actually doing. We helped build Nourish Safety, we can see where you listened to us and applied our feedback. It’s good to work with a partner you can explore things with. 

“I’m very excited about our future with Nourish. Whenever I speak to Nourish, or hear people from Nourish at conferences, it’s so refreshing. I love the ideas you have. It’s clear you are pushing for change, you want to help move social care forward and not just rest on your laurels as a company, which is great. 

“I love how you build products for the sector. Co-producing them with providers and people with lived experience. I’m feeling quite excited about the possibilities. Really, it feels like the art of the possible rather than ‘that’s good enough’. 

“I think social care is used to ‘That’s good enough’, but with Nourish we feel like we can do anything!”

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. 

Digital care record systems have gone from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘need to have’ in social care. Most providers have moved to a digital system or are in the process of implementing one. With widespread digital uptake the question has changed from; ‘are you using a digital system?’ to ‘are you using the right digital system for your service?’

Just under two years ago the government launched its ‘Digitising Social Care’ campaign, delivering the three year £150 million investment for digitally transforming adult social care, as was set out in the 2021 white paper, People at the Heart of Care.

This campaign built on a decade of digitisation in Social Care. Driven in part by the pandemic. That saw care providers take on a variety of different digital systems to help them deliver outstanding care.

The driving force of the ‘Digitising Social Care’ campaign has focussed on ensuring 80% of providers, and at least 80% of people in receipt of care, have a Digital Social Care Record (DSCR) that is compliant with their standards in place by March 2024. While it fell slightly shy of this target. There has still been a significant uptake in digital social care records. From the 40% of providers using them at the start of the campaign. The uptake reflects the benefits of digital systems in care, and the necessity of compliance with the established DSCR standards. These positive results have led to the government extending funding for the campaign until March 2026.

Nourish Care was the first system to join the NHS England Assured Solutions List back in 2021. Since then, the list has grown significantly, so how do you choose the right one?

Incompatibility between systems and services is a rising source of operational frustration for providers. ‘All-in-one’ systems can be limited by the applicability and lack the resources to support more complex or person-centred care, while specialised systems can be disconnected, leaving your team to fill in the gaps between them manually.

Routine system evaluations are a great way to uncover and address these frustrations. This process involves identifying the issues with the platform you are using and evaluating the impact of this issue on your organisation. It takes time and effort to establish the best criteria sets for your service. We have included a guide which you can use to help you get started.

Digitisation has impacted everyone involved in care, so it is best practice to include your entire organisation in the evaluation process. Any frustrations caused by your digital system will be felt by carers and coordinators alike.

Your organisation has multiple roles and responsibilities, and it is important to involve them in your evaluation process through interviews and surveys. An example of some common roles are:

If possible, you should also involve the people who utilise your service in this process, such as when evaluating the effectiveness of integrations with other systems like PainChek or GP Connect as well as circle of care functionality like a family portal.

The more experiences you can account for when evaluating your system, the more complete your picture of its impact will be.

Digitisation in Social Care happened at such a rapid pace since COVID that, understandably, some people have been left behind. When evaluating the impact of your system it is important to consider not just the functionality, but also the user experience.

Do your team feel confident not only with the system, but with the support they have around it? Are there resources and training available to help your team improve their understanding of the system? Is there a customer support team they can reach out to for guidance and support?

Many issues with digital systems come from their misapplication. When evaluating your current digital platform, it is vital to consider your team’s comfort with the system. It might be a matter of reviewing and reworking the way you are implementing the system, as opposed to changing your system all together.

To provide outstanding care, you must constantly be reviewing and improving upon your processes in a responsive and caring way. It is natural to expect the same of your system, as you both adapt to the always evolving reality of care provision.

Digital skills develop over time. With that time it is common to look for more ways to apply your skills to support your care. Such as through data reporting and analysis. By routinely reviewing the capabilities of yourself and your system. You can make sure you are maximising the benefits of your digitisation journey.

The new DSCR standards must be fully met by everybody on the ASL. They represent the next step of Social Care’s digitisation journey. An evolving emphasis on data, security and interoperability that reflects the success and potential of digital software in care. 

The new compliance regulations were announced last year and Nourish has been busy ensuring that it meets each of the 14 standards. This level of screening will mean that only software suppliers who meet stringent standards will be able to remain on the NHS Assured Solutions List.

With so many options available to care providers for digital systems, it is the perfect time to review the needs of your service and community. There is a wealth of suppliers eager to explain their system and its capabilities to you. By knowing what you have and what you want from a digital platform. You will be well-equipped to get what you need.

At Nourish we are well versed in helping people to transition from underperforming digital care record systems to ours. We have resources, guides and team members who would be delighted to talk to you about the process further. If you would like to learn more contact us.

South Coast Homecare want to change the future of care. Their focus is on delivering connected, safe care that reaches across their community. As part of this ambitious undertaking South Coast digitised their processes with Nourish Empower five years ago. Utilising the system to better organise their service and centralise their data. South Coast continue to champion innovation, such as their ‘contingency care plans’. Which offer people an onramp to care services through initial, light touch support that helps normalise using care services as a proactive measure. Establishing relationships with people well before they need to draw upon more regular support.

This forward-thinking approach led South Coast to explore further digitisation options. As part of their development plan they upgraded from Empower to Nourish Better Care at Home in Spring 2025. We met with their Head of Care, Rebecca Palmer, to chat about the roll out, their focus on building connections and the value of clear communication. 

“At South Coast we want to promote independence. That’s why preventative care is better than reactive care. Sometimes we take on a new person and we have to crisis manage. When you go in to check up on them you see how much of their condition could have been prevented. They’re undernourished and that causes other issues. They haven’t been taking their medication, which has caused high blood pressure. They’re not drinking enough which led to a urine infection. With the right information and better communication all those things can be prevented. 

“It’s a massive part of what we use Nourish Better Care at Home for. We need care plans that make sure when anything changes with a person, the care plan is updated quickly. So we need a reactive, easy to update system. 

“Previously we were using these templates on the computer and if you moved something the document could reformat itself randomly. We needed to go onto a proper electronic system. One where we could access information, review it, update it as necessary and be confident everyone who needs to see it can. If someone goes from a Zimmer frame to a hoist that’s a major change. We need to document it effectively to keep them safe, to get the information to the carers and be compliant with the CQC. 

“Nourish helps us do this in a quick and efficient way. Time is something no one has, yet compliance is something everyone needs. Better Care at Home helps us to be responsive and preventative, but in a safe way.”

“Communication is essential, no issues will ever be sorted until communication is in place. This rings true within our organisation and especially when working with other people in health and care. With clear communication we can make sure everyone is on the same page, and we’re all working together. There’s no ‘this person does this, this person does that’. There’s clear communication that goes out. This is what to do, and then everyone does the same thing.  

“It prevents complaints, it prevents accidents, it prevents loads of things having that good communication. I think that’s one of the things that makes home care needs different. Residential homes, care homes, hospitals, they all work together. They’re in the same building.  

“But in home care we are segregated. We’re in the office, they are out doing the care calls. Carers are our eyes and ears in the community. We rely on them to keep us informed. It’s vital we use Nourish Better Care at Home to feed the right information both ways and keep them informed too.”

“It makes it much easier for us to link in with our carers, because you can put alerts on there for them. It’s very easy to send emails and text messages and tag carers where necessary. 

“You can write an update on there. ‘District nurses have said etc etc’ and then you can tag carers in the update. So, when they will go to the call and use their phone and to log into the app it will come up. They need to acknowledge they’ve read it before they can continue. You’re not having to do lots of manual stuff. It’s one thing, tag all the relevant carers that are going to support that person for the next couple of weeks. Put an end date to it and the communication is sorted. 

“We can also do this with notes the carers leave, which is fantastic for promoting carer to carer communication. Because the carer reads the notes of the other carer before proceeding. This approach creates a continuity of care that benefits our carers and the people they support.” 

“Nourish makes it easier for our carers to flag things to the supervisors. If they see something they need to alert, they will write up their notes and they’ll click a little button and it will say supervisor alert. That will ping through to us in the office that someone’s not just written notes, they’ve pinged up notes that need reviewing. Which helps us respond effectively to prevent people having deteriorating accidents. 

“A lot of the alerts were already available to us with Nourish Empower. Now with Nourish Better Care at Home we can build upon that functionality. It gives us more access to be able to do more, and to be able to change more information easily. Which is vital for responsive, preventative care. Supervisors deal with the OT’s, the physios, the GPS, the district nurses. Now we can easily get that information across to where it’s most actionable. Leading to more informed carers and better outcomes for the people receiving support.”

“I love the family portal. We have a lot of people whose families want to be involved in their loved one’s care. Which previously for us meant sending out a lot of weekly care note updates. Which is an understandable request. 

“But, if someone goes off sick and someone forgets to do it, then you get a complaint. The family haven’t had their notes. They’ve missed out the crucial communication. Let’s face it, it’s always due to communication. With the family portal that communication is so much easier. They can go in and check up on their loved one. Which keeps them informed and frees up time for us to focus on other things. 

“Plus, with the ease of communication it’s easier for families to become involved with preventative care practises. Especially with some of the people we support who don’t have as many weekly calls.”

“Our primary goal a lot of times is to prevent deterioration and accidents. What we can do if it’s a long term issue is use tasks to note the support they need. 

“You can create specific tasks on every client and make them individual. For example ‘Jeff’ can take his medication himself. However, you must go and check that they have taken it and highlight it if he hasn’t. That can be a task for every call, and we can leave it on there for as long as we like. This promotes personalised care, and helps us support individuality and autonomy for the people using our service.  

“Certain clients will want to wear Minnie mouse pyjamas on a Wednesday because that’s just who they are. So, that task would stay on there because it’s individual to them. When you look at care you have to be individual. You have to be holistic. That’s how you start to try and give individual care.”

“You’ve been brilliant! I’ve been messaging a lot as we set up Better Care at Home. There’s always going be things that come up so it’s fantastic to see that everyone is really responsive. Our Customer Support Manager (CSM) is even proactive with us. 

“He called us once just before a bank holiday to say he won’t be available. He asked ‘Is there anything else you want to go through with me before I’m off for a couple of days?’ So we quickly went through some things, and we were well set up. It’s not as if the system has been put in and we’ve been left to work it out for ourselves. You never get used to a system until you play with it. It’s very reassuring to know that we can try things out for ourselves and still know there’s people to reach out to for guidance. 

“The support team are fab as well. We ask for more acute support from them, and all they normally need is a screenshot. I’ll just use the snipping tool, chuck it to the support agent. They’ll come back shortly with a solution for us to try out. Between our CSM and the support line we are well resourced to make sure we get everything we need from the system.”

“When the West Sussex Local Authority came in to inspect us they were very happy with Nourish. They came in for what is a lot like a mini CQC inspection. They had a lot of questions about the functionality of the platform. ‘How do you check your appointment times and length of calls?’ ‘Can you audit the necessary information?’ ‘How do the supervisor alerts work?’ 

“They really liked the supervisor alerts things and the amount of audits you can run through Nourish. Those aren’t features you commonly find with digital homecare platforms. stuff you can run through it, they liked that it was it was there handy quick you know that sort of thing. The efficiency of the system impressed them, and how it helps us centralise our information.

“Approximately half of the people we support receive funding through the Local Authority. So their satisfaction with Nourish was a big win for us.”

Ness M Care Services understand the strength that can come from community, and the passion it requires to bring such communities to life. For 15 years, their service’s reputation is synonymous with personal care, and energising support. With a clientele of around 130 people across the UK, their aim is to support people’s independence while helping them to live full lives in their communities. This commitment to community pushed them to utilise digital technology. Ness M Care Services tried their hand with different digital platforms before switching to Nourish Empower in 2021. Since then, they’ve found the centralisation of information, communication across the services and collaboration with Nourish teams to be exactly what they were looking for.

Centralised information & communication
Ensuring the right people always have access to the right data, securely and in real-time.

Improved care quality
With easier access to care plans, risk assessments and live updates, carers can deliver more personalised, responsive support.

Greater efficiency & time savings
Streamlined documentation and call monitoring mean less admin and more meaningful engagement with clients.

Enhanced compliance & inspection readiness
Clear evidence of care, regular review alerts, and accurate reporting improve regulatory confidence

Boosted trust & reputation
Transparent sharing of records strengthens relationships with clients, families, regulators and funders alike.

Empowered staff & managers
Carers find the app simple and reliable, while managers benefit from up-to-date information and easier oversight.

Support for business growth
Smoother operations have enabled Ness M Care Services to expand confidently without sacrificing quality of care.

We spoke to Ness M Care Services’s Founder and Managing Director, Jacqualine Moyo, about their experience with Nourish. We explored how they ensure their teams are informed and their community remains connected with Nourish Empower. The benefits that are felt at every level of their service, throughout their community and the positive impact this has had for their reputation with clients, regulators and funders alike! 

“We previously used a different software, and we were getting annoyed with it. There was a lot of frustration around access to the software. It was unresponsive and we were constantly being cut off. As you can imagine in this environment, homecare doesn’t wait for anything. When I was talking about these issues with other providers they recommended I look into Nourish Empower. 

“Once we switched the accessibility and ease of use was quickly apparent to us. My Team Leaders and I found it was easy to create rotas and share with the team. Our teams were no longer getting cut off from the information they needed, because it is all accessible on their phones.”  

“Nourish Empower is a very user friendly. When we onboarded our teams to Empower they picked it up quite quickly. Including the admin staff in the office found it quite easy to onboard information. It was straightforward for them to share the right information with the right people across our service.” 

“We have a dedicated Account Manager who is readily available and they are an enormous resource for us. We also have an Empower ‘superuser’ of sorts on our side who communicates with our Account Manager on our behalf. Thanks to this established relationship addressing challenges when they arise is seamless for us. We contact our Empower communications person and they get in touch with our Account Manager. 

 “We also find the updates through the app really useful. It’s a great source of upcoming important information. As well as being a quick and straightforward way to get solutions and direction on the app.”

“Roles and permissions are a massive help. We can share information across the system to everybody who needed it. It’s accessible to all our staff, with obvious limitations depending on who you are within the organisation. We’ve got carers, team leaders, registered managers and of course senior people like myself. We must manage the data effectively, and share it appropriately. Our senior people are able to manage information that everyone else can’t access or change. So Empower allows for us to have our own level of boundaries. Which is vital for secure information and data protection.”

“When we’ve got, for example, a new client, it’s much easier to share their information with the right people. Previously it was always a challenge in terms of effectively communicating important information to our carers. We’ve always been able to do that in person. Now that information is uploaded and readily available to everybody it’s much easier to communicate across our service. You only need to send people to their app if you needed to send out a message specifically about a client, or if I want to send a general message to our teams, it is visible to them wherever they are. 

“So communication is faster and is more efficient and is to everybody that needs it.”

“Absolutely, in terms of evidencing to both regulators and the local authorities who are very keen to know how we spend their money! They want to see that we are actually spending the time that they pay us for with the client. Which is why the call monitoring features on the Empower app are so impactful. All our staff can record their actual appointment times accurately and securely with ease when they log in and out. Which creates the exact evidence we are being asked for.

“It’s not just the logging in and logging out either. It is able to tell us live about the care that we provide as it happens. As soon as somebody writes their information and presses the send button at the end of an appointment, it is available on the other side for our managers. This again helps improve our communication and ensures the right people have what they need. It’s very helpful for care management.”

“The accessibility of care documents to staff improved the quality of our care a lot. Our teams can do a lot better when they have the right information. Care plans are essential documents in care, and the accessibility of those documents or similarly important information like risk assessments, to our staff is vital. Having them so easily to hand has improved care significantly and been a game changer for us.

“It’s also helped us improve the quality of the notes our teams are writing. We are able to see what they are writing and this helps us from both and communication and a training point of view. In terms of training our staff, it helps us refine how we document appointments effectively. Quality documentation is a serious side of care that people don’t think about enough in my opinion. If it’s not written properly, it doesn’t reflect the exact needs of the person. Then they don’t get the care and support they need. By centralising our information, improving the quality of that information and then applying it to our care we have significantly improved the support we provide to our community.”

“Absolutely, centralisation is a huge benefit. Especially with the alerts we can set up to highlight important information and timelines.”

“Lots of ways, lets take the example of a care plan. Care plans need to be reviewed regularly. We generally set care plan review for every four months quarter. With Nourish Empower I can set up alerts to make sure we stay on top of these reviews at every level of our service. It will give an orange alert when it’s near the time, and when you’re past the review period to changes to red. It seems simple but it’s a big help for understanding what’s coming at a glance. It’s also a very important compliance tool from an inspection point of view.

“Care plan reviewing is essential for quality care. As well as engaging with the people you support. Homecare can quickly become quite hectic, and that is when things can get overlooked or underreported. Alerts make sure nothing falls between the cracks of your care delivery. Ensuring we are always up to date and in step with our clients, from our carers to our senior level.”

“First of all, from a director level, it’s made things a lot simpler for all my managers. Which is always what you want for the system.

“For our managers, information is key. Access to information is key for staff. It impacts the way we communicate and everything else throughout our service. The fact the information from our appointments is up to date and shared as soon as it is recorded is incredible.

“Also when preparing for an inspection as a registered manager it’s fantastic. All the things that I’ve been talking about; the access to information, the alerts, the way it organises the care system, the client and staff information and just simplifies all these things from an inspection point. It’s brilliant.”

“I think the most important was the accessibility and the availability. We can rely on Nourish Empower. I mean, comparing it to the issues we had with our previous software it’s night and day. We’ve never had a situation where we shut down.  

“The ease of use is also critical. Our carers find the app so simple and effective. I may be the managing director but I also still participate as a carer. So, I experienced first hand how the app enhanced our approach to care. 

“It’s so straightforward and it speeds up so much of our admin. Checklists also expedite the documenting about a client. Which is much quicker than writing by hand like we used to do. It’s quick, it’s easy to share and it gives our carers more time with the people we support.”

“I think first of all, it’s better quality care. The care that they receive is very well guided. Their care plans are regularly reviewed as well the impact of our support, which keeps us up to date. This means we can move the journey of their needs with them. Adapting our support to their ambition and co-producing the best results for everyone involved. Because we are there when things change, we can see them change and we are informed at all times.  

“Also, people want to know about what we write about them. The Empower app makes it very easy to download that information and send it to our clients. Or share it with their relatives if they need to see information about their loved ones. We can email this information or download it and share as appropriate.  It’s got the facts that are needed. It’s got the care at the time they came in, all visible for them to query if they want to.  

“So it’s improved trust. It’s improved the relationship that we have with our clients and their families. The trust that when they see things that we see. We noticed it also improved our company reputation as well in the areas we worked with.”

“Of course! The funders are part of the community. Obviously they want the right information to justify their spending. With Nourish Empower we can deliver evidence of what we do, when we do it, and how long we do it for easily. Which has improved our reputation with them. If this information is not very clear, it reduces the levels of trust.

“We are in a much, much better space with our funding authorities because we can deliver information that they can see clearly.”

“It’s hard to quantify but it’s evident in the pace with which information is shared throughout our service. We are in a position to accept a package at 5:00pm at end of the day. Because our carers will have access to this information when they go visit that person later that day. That’s improves our pace across the board, which is difficult to quantify. 

 “The time spent typing writing is drastically reduced, which is easier! Our reports say on average we are able to give 10 minutes of direct engagement to our clients. That are not task related. Just focused on engaging them and getting to know them, thanks to the app giving us that extra time with the people we support.” 

“Definitely, we’ve seen our significant growth over the past couple of years. Obviously when everything flows smoothly, we are able to grow. We are able to take on clients, upload and quickly have information accessible. We can efficiently arrange and organise our staff.

“I think it would have been very difficult to grow at the level we have without Empower. To manage the level of what we’ve experienced without a software that is tied to our community and supporting our processes would be very difficult.

“In turn, I feel we also help you grow too. We’ve been part of your journey by feeding information back to you. We feel like we’re in a partnership because we can see the feedback we provide being implemented.”

“I think it’s the accessibility to information really, which has improved our communication. I see efficient care planning and remote monitoring helping us improve outcomes for the people we support. As a provider we are better at compliance. Homecare is a very highly regulated industry so this is a big win for us.

“But also in terms of our contracts and complying them, particularly the financial side of the contracts. We were struggling to evidence visibly the actual appointment times that we spent with clients. Now it’s a straightforward and simple process.

“Really Nourish Empower improved things in many areas, so it’s hard to pick just one! As a managing director I’ve got a very happy staff, a thriving business, and I feel very supported.”

“The future is bright. Nourish are an attentive company. You consider what the customer says and really work on relationships with them. I know you appreciate that the job we do is very difficult. That information is key to what we do. That understanding is why I really see a future with Nourish.”