If you’re not tapping into workforce management tools, you should be.
The aged care sector is undergoing significant transformations driven by a need to significantly reduce labour costs, crack down on employee misconduct, and generally improve quality of care for elders.
Budgets, care standards, and the well-being of individuals are all areas now coming under serious scrutiny at public, organisational and government level.
This means workforce management (WFM) strategies need to be stronger than ever, and be able to operate without error, or unnecessary costs.
In this article we explore the pivotal role workforce management technology will play in optimising operations, and keeping the dollars down.
Cost concerns in aged care around the world
- In the US, costs per occupied bed in the aged care sector have increased by more than 18% since 2010. Most long-term care facilities have just managed to break even, with profit margins hovering around -0.32 and 0.25% — much lower than those of hospitals.
- In the UK, the sector has also been struggling for years, with hundreds of residential elderly care operators collapsing and home care providers on average losing money per patient. Source: UK Vital Signs Workforce challenges for elderly care
- Australia has experienced significant increases in labour costs, partly due to the care minute targets and changes to minimum wages for care workers.
The key to driving down costs and optimising scarce resources
Workforce management technology is set to play a crucial role in supporting aged care compliance, duty of care and keeping costs down.
Here’s how:
WFM ensures adequate staffing and resources
Using workforce management technology enables appropriate scheduling of staff to provide continuous care that meets strict regulations around individual care. Using a workforce management system you can quickly identify workload issues, time needed for staff to complete tasks, and any patterns around staff demand.
Identifies training needs and where additional staff support is needed
As standards evolve, so too must the skills of the workforce. Robust workforce management systems support employee monitoring and allow you to pinpoint issues as soon as they arise.
Patterns around employee misconduct or common errors and issues can be picked up quickly and additional training / support can be allocated as needed.
Workforce data management
WFM systems provide a centralised platform for managing employee data including care time, movement and location, compliance history, shift patterns, staff decisions and actions – this all comes into play in supporting transparency and accountability in the event of an audit or investigation.
Compliance and accountability
Compliance with quality standards calls for ongoing performance monitoring and reporting.
Chief Technology Officer, Barton Ip says workforce management technology like Contact Harald automates otherwise timely and often inaccurate monitoring and reporting procedures such as:
- Analysing staff to patient interactions
- Pinpointing where time and resources are being underutilised or wasted.
- Ensuring appropriate level of care is consistently provided.
“The focus is now firmly on care quality and costs within the aged care sector. Workforce management technology creates transparency and gives management access to reliable data around any gaps in care quality or any leaking costs,” he said.
“We know that manual monitoring and reporting is often riddled with human error, so it makes absolute sense to utilise technology that takes care of it all for you and can provide you with actionable data for budgeting and resource allocation.”
“Systems like Contact Harald allow you to view the who, what, where and when across every space in your service and then report on activities with just the click of a button”, Barton said.
Failure to adopt WFM tech – what it could mean
Ultimately, without a robust workforce management system, the onus is on you to manually monitor each and every staff member to ensure quality of care, to have an accurate level of data on operations at all times, and to identify any leaking or unnecessary costs.
Without a WFM system you’ll likely find yourself faced with:
- Decreased quality of care
- Increased staff turnover and burnout
- Inadequate deployment of teams and resources
- Inefficiencies and increased operational costs
- Leaking labour costs
- Unaccountable workers
- Reduced staff and individual satisfaction
- Limited and inaccurate data to make changes from
Conclusion
In an industry where quality and quantity of care is paramount, the adoption of workforce management tech is no longer optional, rather, an essential part of business.
Those who choose to neglect or embrace these tools fully, face a range of serious repercussions from every operational stakeholder.
The challenge of aged care quality and costs is too complex, and the solution is too simple to ignore anymore.
If you’re ready to implement a smarter, more affordable and compliant way of working at your aged care service, chat to the team at Contact Harald today.
