SOUTHWEST-BASED social care consultancy practice Shreeve Care Services is partnering with call answering service Care Assist to support care providers to answer phone calls.
“After two decades witnessing care providers struggle with overwhelming call volumes whilst families desperately seek information about loved ones, I’ve found a solution to one of the sector’s most damaging yet overlooked problems: unanswered calls,” said Janet, who lives in Wiltshire.
The scale of the crisis is staggering. Industry research reveals 52% of care home enquiry calls go unanswered, with 85% of callers never ringing back. For a typical care home, each missed enquiry could mean a loss of £73,000 to £81,000 in lost annual revenue. This comes at a time when social care is on its knees and families are struggling to access care solutions for loved ones. (see editors’ notes for report)
“The goal is to take away the stress of ‘on call’ for providers of care. From my experience there has always been a problem of getting people to take phone calls at weekends and evenings and it does not allow staff to have a break,” said Janet.
“However, it is often at the weekends or in the evening that prospective clients are most likely to call. Therefore, opportunities are missed because no one has time to pick up the phone, book appointments or provide the information a caller requires.”
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) also lists ‘communication failures’ in many of their ‘inadequate’ ratings of care providers as being ‘responsive’ is a vital element of its standards. Therefore routinely not answering phone calls presents a regulatory risk.
“This is a circle that’s hard to square,” said Janet. “With problems around recruitment and retention and a lack of funds to recruit staff to deal with call handling and other important administrative tasks, business is simply being turned away by inaction.”
Janet, who founded Shreeve Care Services four years ago, provides bespoke business development, consultancy and advice services to new and established care businesses across the UK. However she has more than 20 years of experience working in social care and is an expert in CQC registration support, business development, consulting, and is also known for her ‘You Care, I Care’ podcast which deals with real world stories around the social care sector. It was this knowledge which led her to support Care Assist founder Oliver Codrington.
“Janet spotted what we hadn’t fully recognised – care providers need more than technology. They need sector expertise wrapped around the platform. This partnership creates something neither of us could build alone: a complete solution that works in the real world of social care,” he said.
Janet recognised this lack of communication within the sector was exacerbating social care challenges:
*A recruitment crisis – the sector has more than 152,000 vacancies so doing more ‘admin’ is not a priority.
*Care chaos – over worked staff cannot worry about answering a phone while being on hand to care for clients.
*Regulatory risk – not communicating effectively carries real risks when it comes to CQC standards.
For Janet, Care Assist, which is a provider of 24/7 professional call handling exclusively for care providers, was a natural partner.
“This platform which uses both AI technology and call handlers is already proven in other sectors and we are thrilled to work with Janet to introduce it as an efficiency measure and income generator for care providers across the UK,” Oliver said.
“Our mission is to never miss an enquiry. We answer every phone call within three rings, handle initial enquiries, book viewings, take detailed messages, and integrate into existing processes.”
Care Assist has no third-party dependencies, to find out more contact Janet via Shreeve Care Services.