We looked for rota software because we wanted to save time and reduce the amount of mistakes made.
Rotas really shouldn’t be this hard
Scheduling the large care team, housekeepers, specialist staff and admin team at Bevern House is no picnic. With a team of 58 staff members, each shift not only needs to have the right number of staff including a shift leader and a senior, but also requisite numbers of female staff and those appropriately trained for medication, driving, lifeguard duties, epilepsy care etc. Add in specialist activities, the constantly changing needs of the residents and staff turnover and you soon have a real headache coordinating staffing levels and ensuring that the service is covered at all times. Oh and you need to make sure that everyone is given their fair share of weekends off. Ugh.
The short straw
Pity the manager who’s been given this daunting task. For The Bevern Trust, this fell to Ashly Sarsons, the Registered Manager, and it was taking her 10 hours every two weeks for two weeks’ worth of a rolling six week rota.
A personal pressure
Ashly can now take comfort from the fact that all the complex rules are no longer stored only in her head and that she alone doesn’t have to try to remember them all whenever she draws up a rota; a big personal advantage of having the software and avoiding a key man dependency for the service.
It also makes planning much easier. Whilst changes are inevitable (and are almost daily), the fact that the changes can be processed using OmniRota means that all of the impacts of a change can be considered and planned for.
Taking the plunge
Ashly believes that people often shy away from taking the plunge into rota software because they can’t quite believe that it’s capable of doing the job.
OmniRota - A new rota system
OmniRota takes just minutes to work out the best, fairest rota that meets your ‘rota rules’ and flags any exceptions: where the home is under-staffed or if your pre-agreed guidelines are not being met. And it’s simple to adjust for last minute changes. It also provides reports to show the parity of allocations and can send individuals’ rotas to their phones, emails or to Intradoc247 to be distributed easily to staff.
Getting started
"Basically they help you to work through it to come up with your rota rules”, Ashly explains. “The set up process was hard for me as a lot of the rules were in my head and writing it all down and remembering everything took a few times to get right but the service was brilliant and I was really supported to get it right."
Ashly Sarsons is Registered Manager for The Bevern Trust, a charity dedicated to helping people with profound disabilities to get more from life.