Lifeways are the UK’s largest specialist support provider for adults with complex needs. A longstanding leader in personalised, contextual care and support, they celebrated 30 years of transforming lives in 2025. Never an organisation to rest on their laurels, three years ago Lifeways launched their ambitious Transformation Plan. The plan oversaw huge investments in properties, training, systems and pay, as well as a fresh strategy, new purpose, new vision, new mission, and new strategic objectives. All aimed at achieving their goal to be both the employer of choice and the provider of choice in care and support.
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Their Transformation Plan is a huge success, earning a range of accolades and nominations in 2025, including several for their application and implementation of technology. At the start of their initiative 3 years ago, Lifeways’ care management system was entirely paper based. Today, 8,000 Lifeways team members utilise Nourish Better Care to support over 4,000 people across 1,100 services. This has reduced paperwork and improved sustainability for Lifeways by eliminating unnecessary admin and saving them on average £120K annually.
Primarily, Lifeways provide supported living as well as some residential and mental health services. We chatted to Lifeways’ Chief Transformation Officer, Amanda Brooke, to learn more. Amanda was shortlisted for ‘Digital Innovator of the Year’ at the Social Care Leadership Awards 2025 for spearheading their digital transformation and was a winner at the Care Home Awards in May 2025 for her successful implementation of Nourish.
Our conversation carried us through their transformation journey, the benefits felt across their service and why they are so excited for the future.
In this Nourish Better Care Case Study, we discuss:
Lifeways’ transformation plan
This focuses on people, processes, and systems, improving culture and streamlining processes through automation and digitisation
The rollout
How Lifeways got people to buy in across their services
Benefits
Some of the improvements they are already seeing
Risk management
How Lifeways are using digital features to improve information security and care quality
Data
How Nourish helps Lifeways to collect richer data
Time saving
The efficiencies that have been unlocked
Oversight and Escalation
How Lifeways is utilising Nourish and other systems to improve the quality of their reporting and responding at every level
The future
What’s next for Lifeways’ Transformation Plan and Nourish
What was it like when you first came into Lifeways and started leading the digital transformation?
“Everything was managed on paper, whether that was the roster, appointment times, care management, reviewing and reporting. We were sending timesheets out in envelopes every week and hand-writing notes at the end of each day. It was all so time consuming. None of that is caring for people, none of that time is spent where it needs to be.
“My general approach to everything we’ve done in transformation is to make sure that we’re removing the stuff that’s getting in the way of the important job.
“For a support worker, their role is to support the person in their care. It is not to do a whole load of administrative work. For managers, their time should be spent with their teams, developing them, leading them, coaching them and supporting them. It should not be sitting there at their desk wrestling with handwritten time sheets trying to ensure that people get paid and billing is accurate.”
What did you want to achieve with your digitisation?
“Nourish helps us remove the noise for our teams. With functionality that helps us achieve the goals we set around quality improvement, reduction in medication errors, improving general oversight, strengthening governance around our support plans and enhancing the quality of interactions that we’re having with the people we support.
“But fundamentally, we wanted to be able to enable people to have the information they need at the time they need it. So, they can concentrate on the person they’re supporting.”
How did you rollout Nourish across your services?
“We launched Nourish in November 2023 with 12 pilot services. We’ve since successfully rolled it out across nearly 1,100 services. We designed a phased, feedback-led rollout. Staff feedback from early pilots provided invaluable insights that guided our configuration of the system, device allocation and identified the additional resources required by our support workers. This collaboration shaped our training, hardware deployment, and change management. With each subsequent phase, we have continued to refine the process making it smoother and more efficient.
“We also built cross-functional project teams, integrating operational, quality, and data experts to embed the system effectively. This approach ensured meaningful change, not just technological replacement.”
What was the rollout like for your support workers?
“The real challenge we saw coming was getting everyone to buy in to the new system. Our support workers have quite a diverse age range. It is fair to say that some of the older team members were really worried about what it was going to be like.
“So, we used change champions to share their experience, peer to peer, and we put together a video detailing what ‘A Day in the Life’ with Nourish looked like. It really helped us in our rollout because we wanted to be able to show what Nourish was really like. And how it helped us to spend more time with the people we support and made it easier to know more about them.
“Change is scary. The more we could show our teams that, ‘actually, this isn’t horrible, it’s easy to use and it’s really going to support you in your role’, the more it helped us show our teams the reality of Nourish. It just makes everything easier.”
What are the key benefits you’ve seen from your rollout?
“We’ve made so many changes over the past two years as part of our Transformation Plan that I was honestly expecting to see a bit of a dive in some of our statistics. I thought our engagement would take a dip because we’ve been asking so much of people. I also expected our family satisfaction and that of the people we support to possibly dip as they were impacted by the changes too. In reality, we’ve seen the opposite, which has been amazing. Nourish has been central to our transformation and has supported our ambition to make Lifeways the provider of choice in our sector.
“Nourish saves support workers a significant amount of admin time per day with dictated care logging at the point of care and collated handover notes. The impact of getting this time back can be felt across our services.
“Two significant improvements we’ve seen are employee engagement and compliance. Our employee engagement has gone from 59% to 74% across our whole organisation as a result of the transformation journey we have been on.
“Likewise, the quality of our compliance went from 77% to 92.5% (inclusive of Fulcrum mock inspections). Nourish played a key role in these improvements. The quality oversight it provides across our data and services simplifies processes and elevates the overall quality of our compliance.”
How does Nourish help you manage risk?
“The safety and security of the people we support is paramount to us. There are several features with Nourish that have helped us reduce risk. For example, our medication errors have come down quite considerably. That’s a big one for us and obviously huge for the people we support.
“We’ve also seen GDPR risk hugely reduced because it’s so much easier for us to manage digital documents than our previous physical records. Moving all of that paperwork onto a digital platform is a game changer for us. It makes it so much easier to record, review and respond effectively across our services.”
How has digitising with Nourish impacted your data quality and application?
“First and foremost, we met the NHS requirement to digitise social care records. Obviously, that was a big tick in the box which supports us from a tendering and procuring perspective. As well as ensuring we are in line with the government’s future plans for health and social care data. We’re on a bit of a journey with how we use our data, which is one part of what we have termed ‘Transformation Phase 2’
“Since implementing Nourish Better Care we’ve definitely started collecting much richer data. We’re especially getting richer data on the support that’s being logged by our carers. The handsets play a huge role. A lot of our team members are now using speech-to-text notes, instead of writing everything down. That’s led to much better-quality care notes. Things are being recorded as they happen. Rather than being written down at the end of the shift when they’re in a rush. In some cases, people we support are adding their views of their support onto Nourish as well. Then those notes are appended with photos, which is, again, so much richer. They give so much more value to that care record.”
How does Nourish help your team save time?
“We saved time across a lot of our processes thanks to Nourish. As I said previously, on average Nourish saves our support workers the written admin time at the end of the day. That time then goes straight back into better support for the person that we’re supporting.
“We’re also seeing time saved on handovers because of the way Nourish can manage the handover information, as well as time saved through the quality checking functionality. Alerts are incredibly useful, both staff and managers receive them, and managers can see the information on the Insights dashboards we’ve built. This means they have all the information they need without having to hunt through books and paper files.
“All the information we need is much more accessible and much, much easier to get to. The benefits of which are felt throughout our services, from time saving to the quality of our support.”
How do the Insights dashboards and oversight factor back into your care?
“It’s how we’re using it in the governance. The key idea is that they all escalate up together. So a manager can come in and look at their dashboards in the morning and immediately sees if there is anything they need to review or look into, it’s all there to hand.
“When you combine it with the other data in our dashboards, you can see how that aligns with any incidents that have been logged in integrated systems. We can review our shift patterns, as well as the check in and check out patterns. Our managers are looking at the whole picture of safe and effective staffing and any incident management because we’re combining the data across our systems. Nourish is a fantastic tool for sitting at the centre of our digital care ecosystem making it easy for us to review and escalate our combined data.”
Can you talk me through this escalation process?
“From the individual services, information is escalated to the area manager. They can look across all of the services they manage and see all of that information combined. They can then identify any trends, patterns or flags that might indicate an emerging issue.
“In our dashboards that’s all combined with our training data as well. So, you can see whether there’s anyone that you need to flag for any training compliance based on the people they’re supporting that day, that week, and so on. It gives us that holistic overview.
“We can then go up another level and look at the regional view or divisional view. And above that I can look at the whole organisational level. It all combines at each level making it easier to see where there are any concerns and where we have exemplar services and practices.
“This is part of the daily routine across Lifeways. You come in, do your checks, review what’s happened, look for alerts or flags. This ensures a clear oversight of our services. Which in turn enables us to react effectively and focus our attention on the services that need it. Just as Nourish helps our carers focus their efforts on the things that truly make a difference in the lives of the people we support.”
What are the next steps of your transformation plan?
“We finished our rollout in the summer, so we still have a lot of embedding to do. You can’t just give everyone these tools and expect they’re all going to use them consistently from day one?
“We’re seeing some really amazing behaviour from services and some exemplar work. But when you’ve got over 4,000 people being supported across the UK, it’s tricky to ensure consistent system use by everyone. For example, each person has around 17 support plan sections in Nourish. So we’ve got quite a job to do going through all that data to validate them.
“At the start of our Transformation journey we brought all our managers together and collaborated on our plan, values and our vision. This made sure it was one strategy from the organisation, not just a top-down directive. We’re going to get them all back together again shortly to look at how we’re embedding this first phase. We want people to share their experiences so it’s a more peer-to-peer process, building consistency and excellence into our system use.”
How does Nourish factor into the next steps of your transformation plan?
“Oh we have got quite a long roadmap of changes we want to carry on making with Nourish. We’re looking at additional support plan sections and additional data sets, such as level of need.
“There’s also a number of tweaks and changes with the way that we use the tool that we want to go through. Nourish is highly customisable, and the more time we spend with it, the more aware we become of how we can apply it to the specific needs of our services.
“Ultimately, our goal is to be able to report on the outcomes that we are achieving with the people that we support. After all, that’s the most important thing!”
You have no shortage of ambition, do you?
“There’s so much more that we’re working on as part of our Transformation Phase 2 Plan. We are confident Nourish is the digital care partner to help us achieve our goals!”
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