Joy 2 Care is a family-run home care provider built on a simple but powerful philosophy, clients become extended members of the family. At Joy 2 Care, 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.
Joy 2 Care’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.
Joy 2 Care 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 Joy 2 Care utilise Nourish Better Care at Home to improve oversight, reinforce connections, and build for the future.
Sections
The Joy in Joy 2 Care
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 Joy 2 Care 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
How do you approach home care at Joy 2 Care?
“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.”
Why did you choose to join Nourish?
“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.”
How does Better Care at Home support your approach to care?
“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.”
How does Better Care at Home help you review information?
“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.”
How does Better Care at Home help you connect your clients with their families?
“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 Joy 2 Care. 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!”
How important is communication to your care quality?
“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.”
How do your team find using Better Care at Home?
“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.”
How does Better Care at Home help you manage the financial side of your home care service?
“The invoicing is fantastic! The finance functionality in general. Especially from my perspective as that’s my side of the business. At Joy 2 Care 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.”
Operational sustainability is crucial in home care, how does Better Care at Home help you manage your teams and ensure they are set up for success?
“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.”
How do you feel about Joy 2 Care working with Nourish and the future of our digital partnership?
“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.”
