Be Caring Manchester

Kay-Leigh Igo
Operations Manager

Local Leadership

“I would like to thank all the staff at Manchester for all their hard work. We have gone above and beyond for our service users on so many occasions, such as: cleaning service users’ houses in your own time, taking service users to Specsavers, the doctors, and countless other tasks. Thank you all for keeping your service users, yourselves, and your families safe. I am extremely proud to work with such amazing people.”

Overview

Be Caring have been delivering care in Manchester for over 13 years. We have over 125 colleagues providing more than 3,000 weekly hours of care and support every week to 220 people in Wythenshawe, Sale, Trafford, Mosside and Burnage.

Metrics and Stats

People being supported

Colleagues who deliver the care they aspire to

Hours of care and support delivered every week

Number of colleagues

Colleagues that would recommend us as a place to work

Achievements

The previous 18 months have brought about many changes and successes including; a restructure of the Management Team and welcome arrival of Kay-Leigh Igo (Operations Manager), re-tender and award of Be Caring Manchester as prime provider for Brooklands, Northenden, Chorlton Park and Didsbury West.

Culture and Quality

96%

…Sustained Colleague Compliance for Training

Kay-Leigh Igo (Operations Manager) joined Be Caring Manchester in the summer, 2019. Initially, Kay’s focus was on quality assurance and organising the team in the branch, driving up performance and expectations. Working alongside Bronwyn Burgess, Regional Quality Manager, the team have implemented a digital care planning system to ensure more robust and effective quality assurance systems to monitor the quality and safety of the care delivery. Together, they’ve promoted a culture motivated by high quality, person-centred care, evidenced by both internal performance metrics and the most recent colleague survey:

• 94% of colleagues deliver the care they aspire to (compared to 88% in March 2019)

• 96% sustained training compliance for colleagues

• Surpassing weekly and cumulative targets for Be Supported sessions (1-to-1

• supervisions), Best Practice visits (observations in the field), and care plan reviews

sustainability

Prime Provider For Home Care Services

…in Brooklands, Northenden, Chorlton Park and Didsbury West.

Although the team are currently delivering a similar number of hours now, compared to 18 months ago, in February 2020, the service was delivering less than 2,500 weekly hours – as a result of transfers of care and colleagues to other provider organisations under the new contract. The service has had to recruit and rebuild back up to over 3,000 hours, supported by 70 new starters in the 7 months to August 2020.

We were successfully appointed as prime provider to 2 locality areas, following two separate tender rounds; awarded the home care contract for Brooklands and Northenden in June 2019, and for Chorlton Park and Didsbury West in January 2020. We have successfully mobilised the contract for Brooklands and Northenden and will complete the mobilisation, approximately 1,000 incoming hours, for Chorlton Park and Didsbury West by the end of 2020. Once completed, our Manchester service should be delivering 3,700 weekly hours of care to more than 270 people and their families.

Recruitment and Retention

50%

…Reduction in Workforce Turnover

In 2019, one of our biggest challenges in Manchester was recruitment, and more specifically – retention. Historic culture issues meant that Be Caring Manchester had the highest workforce turnover rate in the business. In the past 6 months, from March to August 2020, Manchester’s turnover rate has halved (compared to the 9 months up to February 2020). The improved workforce retention in Manchester has been led by the shift in culture and focus on quality, with higher levels of communication and colleague engagement, for example:

• 82% of colleagues that would recommend us as a place to work compared to 67% (February 2019)

• 81% of colleagues feel listened to and like their opinions seem to count compared to 56% (February 2019)

• 70% of colleagues have received recognition for good work in the past week compared to 56% (February 2019)

Care in the Community

John
Service User, aged 81

“Over the period of lockdown all the carers have been brilliant”

Over the period of lockdown all the carers have been brilliant. My wife, Ann, fell and cut the skin on her head from ear to ear and she has not been well for two months, feeling sick and faint, so she would stay in bed until the carers had finished with me.

The carers would pop their head around her bedroom door and ask if she wanted anything on their arrival and they would get her a drink and some Weetabix while I was in the bathroom. Then they would wash and dress me and take me downstairs and made sure we had everything we needed before going.

They have all been wonderful, so we bought them a box of treats and put them on the table where they took one when they wanted one.

I don’t have any trouble with the carers if they know what they are doing. I have my favourites and I would like them all the time, but I know this is impossible because they are not all drivers.

Our Priorities

COMMUNITY CARE IN MANCHESTER

We’ve made significant progress in Manchester, creating a much more transparent, honest and engaging culture with our colleagues. We have the highest quality compliance metrics for home care services in the business and we’re retaining our colleagues.

OUTSTANDING CARE

We will achieve CQC Outstanding in at least one Key Line of Enquiry (KLoE) at our next inspection

We’ll continue to maintain our high performance and priority focus on care quality, demonstrated by our compliance metrics. We’re meeting monthly with our commissioners and CQC, sharing our data and action plans and being transparent about the challenges we face. We’ll continue to evidence that as a service, and as a management team, we promote person-centred care and support our Care Workers to know people’s preferences, champion choice, flexibility and control, and act promptly to respond to need. We’re confident that we will achieve at least one Outstanding KLoE and can already demonstrate, with evidence, the ways in which we have the characteristics of an Outstanding service, for example, we:

Use our data, evidence and expertise to make improvements
Our colleagues are exceptionally kind and compassionate, going above and beyond to exceed expectations

COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS

We will establish ourselves as a trusted partner with health, social care and the voluntary sector

Our ambition as a prime provider in Manchester, is to support our commissioners to transform homecare, to be a trusted partner and provider with Social Workers, health practitioners and local community groups. We’re already participating in the local Integrated Neighbourhood Team (INT) and have come together with our health, housing, education and voluntary sector partners in response to Covid-19. Through this network, we’re also part of a Neighbourhood Huddle and an Integrated Workforce Planning programme – co-design responses to local needs and influencing the system to recognise care as a valued partner and community asset so that we:

Deliver care as part of a neighbourhood, aligned to the INT, working closely with voluntary and community groups
Support community participation in and out of peoples’ home

SUSTAINED GROWTH

We will continue to attract and retain talent, helping us to consistently deliver more than 3,500 of care every week

One of our key priorities is to sustain high quality care, while mobilising 1,000 hours of care, and this will be supported by strong recruitment and retention. We’ve already seen a significant improvement in our retention and will implement the onboarding process to ensure we offer the right support, early – and settle people into their roles. Over the next 12 months we will consistently deliver more than 3,500 hours of care and support every week.

Our Colleagues: Meet Jodie

Jodie
Care Worker
Started November 2016

“I like to leave someone’s home knowing they’re clean, comfortable, and happy, and if I’ve achieved that, then that’s a good day for me.”

How did you come to work for Be Caring?

It’ll be coming up to four years that I’ve been with Be Caring now. Before that, I had a career working in secondary schools. I used to teach dance to children with special needs and disabilities.

From there I went on to get a job in a high school as a teaching assistant and became involved with the medical care of some of the students. That’s what I was really interested in. I was also working part-time as a barmaid at the time, which I loved, but it was too much. I had no life at all.

It was my sister-in-law who said you should come and try caring. At the time, my Aunty was receiving care and my Mum said something to me that has always stuck. She said, ‘don’t go into this job unless you’re going to care. Don’t go in and do it for the money. Do it and treat the clients like they’re your own family.’ I’ve always stuck to that.

What do you consider the best part of your job?

I think I’d have left a long time ago if it was just for the money! I love my clients and I think that comment from my Mum still means a lot.

I love going in to see clients and just having a laugh. There’s one gentleman I care for who has Motor Neurone Disease (MND), so he can’t talk to us. We literally communicate in that house with laughter. We don’t leave that house unless we’ve had a right good laugh, and we do every time!

I feel like I’m treated like family. I have one client who says that I’m like an adopted daughter, (he says it to a few of us!) We can see people up to four times a day, which is often more than their families see them. I know I spend more time with my clients than I do with my family.

What is the most challenging part of the job?

The company isn’t perfect, but it’s improving, which is what matters. You can see things are changing – people are trying hard to improve what it’s like to work here.

Listening to what carers have to say is how we can change for the better. After all, we’re the ones on the front line dealing with the situations every single day.

How have you found working during the pandemic?

I thought to myself ‘how can I make this situation as safe as possible?’ – not only for my clients, but for me as well. So, I offered to pick up extra shifts to help reduce the number of different carers people had going into their houses.

When we were in lockdown, carers also supported people by doing their shopping in their own time. As many were high risk and I had to go out of the house anyway, I offered to help.