Delivering care for 75 years

BaptistCare NSW&ACT (BaptistCare) is one of Australia’s largest non-profit providers of aged care and community services. With a history that spans 75 years, BaptistCare delivers a wide range of services. These include residential aged care, community-based home care, retirement living, social housing, domestic violence programs, homelessness services, food security programs and no-interest loans.

BaptistCare’s home care arm, BaptistCare at home, supports over 8,000 older Australians to continue to live independently in their own homes, where they want to be. Each week, 1,100 care workers, case managers, clinicians and allied health staff provide a variety of essential support services in clients’ homes, from cleaning, shopping, showering and meal preparation, through to exercise programs, transportation, physiotherapy and nursing care.

Scheduled services vary from 30 minutes to 8 hours in length and may require either one or two staff members, depending on the needs of the client.

In order to cover the vast geographic area of New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, BaptistCare at home operates from 11 offices, with 36 FTE schedulers planning the delivery of around 15,000 hours of services per week. Each location varies in service requirements, with the largest needing approximately 4,800 services a week and the smallest 625 services.

Due to the fluctuating nature of elder care, up to 30% of scheduled services may need to be changed on any given day. Scheduling is thus a consistent pressure point. Planners need to minimize travel time and costs, yet maintain consistency for clients.

Fostering trust and friendships

This consistency is crucial. Caring for someone in their home can become a highly relational activity. Trust needs to be built, especially when intimate tasks such as showering and dressing are involved. While BaptistCare is confident in the skills, training and compassionate heart of all of their workers, clients build relationships with their small team of regular carers and enjoy the consistency that these friendships bring.

So, when changes to times, staffing and schedules are needed, both efficiency and consistency are essential factors to ensure the best outcome for the client. Communicating changes to both staff and clients is also challenging in this fast-paced environment.

While most relevant CRMs contain scheduling modules, these tend to be manually intensive and not built for the scale BaptistCare required. BaptistCare needed an advanced planning solution that could account for specific skills and employee attributes, such as languages spoken and specialist training. The solution also needed to consider client preferences and enterprise agreement rules. Ideally, it should also generate optimized and automated schedules at the click of a button.

Introducing the ORTEC Workforce Management Suite

BaptistCare now uses the ORTEC Workforce Management Suite to roster care workers, schedule home care visits, track the daily execution of visits and calculate payroll. Once implemented, ORTEC made an immediate impact on scheduling efficiency. It considers the care workers’ starting point (their home address) to minimize travel times to their first job and works to keep them in the same area, with familiar clients. During the implementation phase, BaptistCare defined the consistency of care providers as a key constraint in the optimizer. This means many visits are “automatically” scheduled rather than optimized based only on costs and skills. As new clients come on board, workers will be optimized into the schedule to minimize travel times and maximize the maintenance of client-carer relationships.

Care workers quickly embraced the new ORTEC apps, finding the system easy to use. BaptistCare had anticipated that this would be a challenge, as direct care workers typically have a low appetite for new technology. BaptistCare was very happy to be proven wrong. Employees found the apps user-friendly and straightforward, and payroll is now processed more efficiently as manual timesheets were removed.

The role of the schedulers was perhaps the most impacted by the change in systems. Previously, a very significant amount of information had to be maintained outside of the system, in schedulers’ heads, on post-it notes or in other spreadsheets. ORTEC removed the need for all of these and allowed for more time to be spent communicating with staff and clients instead. “The efficiencies around payroll with the removal of manual timesheets was a winner” – Sarah Newman, General Manager, BaptistCare at home.

“The experience has been very positive for us. Our care workers quickly adopted the apps and are finding them simple to use. Schedulers are seeing immediate efficiencies in routing, and overall we’ve really enjoyed the relationship we’ve built with the ORTEC team throughout. We’ve consistently thrown sticky problems at them and have been impressed by their tenacity and talent to come up with the system that we need for our particular situation.” - Sarah Newman, General Manager, BaptistCare at home.