Healthcare Ireland Group is the largest care home service provider in the North of Ireland providing a diverse range of care to over 1200 residents across 25 locations. In this article, Carol Cousins, Director of Strategy, shares how Florence has made an positive impact on their temporary staffing challenges:
The problem
- Inefficient use of cost-effective internal and bank staff – Due to lack of easy to manage systems and processes.
- Lack of centralised control over agency usage – No visibility of what agencies were being used, how and at what rates.
Solution
Healthcare Ireland Group partnered with Florence to address their staffing challenges. The Agency Manager platform allowed them to prioritise use of internal and bank staff, whilst also gaining greater control over agency spend–saving them significant time and money.
The platform also had the added effect of improving governance, consistency and visibility of their agency staffing processes, allowing them to streamline their operations across all 25 sites.
Why Florence
Healthcare Ireland’s team had been working with Florence, using their temporary staffing market place. They then adopted the Agency Manager technology to centralise their staffing agency management – bringing bank, temporary staffing and agency management all into one platform.
Carol chose to use Florence over other neutral vendor platforms she had experienced before due to the ease of use and simplicity of the technology:
“As Agency manager is so easy to use it made it easy to roll-out across the group. All 25 locations and managers have happily got onboard with using it”.
Favourite Florence features
- Prioritising filling shifts with bank and internal staff first: Saving money. The autofill tool has driven down temporary staffing costs, and increased the efficiency of filling rota gaps.
- Agency tiering: Driving up cost-effectiveness. Allowing Healthcare Ireland to focus from 22 agencies down to a top 9 core agencies, driving up efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
- Simplified & centralised invoice management: Saving time. Cutting finance processing saved 130 man hours a year alone.
- Insights dashboard: Informed Exec-level reporting. This has made reporting at the executive and board level far easier, and has had a tangible impact on decision making.
- Enhanced visibility of agency staff profiles: Improved quality of care – Full access to agency worker profiles before booking, ensuring that the right workers are placed in the right environments.
- Full visibility over compliance of agency staff: Compliance assurance. Florence does the work to ensure every agency worker has the essential training and meets compliance requirements.
- Improved reliability, continuity & consistency of care: Consistency of care. Agency manager usage has driven up reliable shift booking by highlighting worker ratings and allowing block bookings with favourites.
- Flexible shift posting: Loved by location managers. Having multiple ways to post shifts has made it easy to use and flexible for location for managers.
Key results
- Adopted across 25 care homes – with ease.
- 6% saving on care staffing budget whilst improving care quality control.
- 130 man hours a year saved on financial administrative tasks alone, this is alongside administration time saved at individual home level on day-to-day temporary staffing management.
“I’ve recommended Florence to several large care groups; the platform is easy for the whole organisation to use and it’s supported us to improve the quality of care standards whilst saving us money. Florence’s client care is also excellent: What really stands out to me is that the team understands, and wants to continue to grow their understanding, of the staffing challenges facing care organisations and find new and better ways to solve them.”
Carol Cousins, Director of Strategy
Healthcare Ireland Group
Find out how Florence can solve your staffing challenges
If you’d like to have a no pressure chat with one of our team about the challenges facing your organisation you can get in touch here: