In 2008 Knowsley Council in partnership with the PCT introduced a Reablement Service, made up of 3 teams covering the Borough. The objective of this service was to help older and vulnerable people to continue living at home with no, or reduced care needs. After a maximum period of 6 weeks, any continuing care needs would be commissioned and delivered by external home care providers.
As the service approached its 1st anniversary, managers were keen to assess its impact and address concerns that
performance was adversely affected by the Reablement Assistant rota, particularly in relation to high levels of unproductive time and continuity of care. OptiCare were commissioned to analyse the situation and develop some alternative rotas which more successfully met the demands of the service. Although only some digital information was available in XL spreadsheets, it was possible to manually supplement and convert the data into a format which could be processed within the optimisation engine.
Analysis of the existing rota demonstrated a clear lack of fit between staff availability and service demand. To address this a number of alternative rotas were designed which were increasingly radical in their structure. From these, 2 were chosen by the Council for rigorous analysis and application to the sample period. Both demonstrated significant improvements in all the required areas.
Once completed, the results showed that reductions of between 5.9% – 8.5% could be made to the weekly
staffing costs. In addition contact time would simultaneously increase by between 11.9 % 13.4% and continuity of care
would also be improved.
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