Community Care

Case Study: ECL

About ECL

Essex Cares Ltd (ECL) is wholly owned by Essex County Council and offers bespoke care and tailored activities to support older people and adults with learning disabilities in Essex and West Sussex.

The services support a wide range of users including older people, adults with learning disabilities and sensory impairment and adults receiving reablement services. They currently operate in six CQC registered locations and employ over 1000 staff.

Why did ECL choose Radar Healthcare?

In 2015, ECL embarked on an organisational change programme with digitalisation of processes top of the agenda. Initially, the priority for software investment was focused around facilities management but on further review, it was established that quality and compliance software would better support ECL’s vision and desire to continually deliver high quality services.

After evaluating a number of other quality and compliance software products, ECL chose Radar Healthcare because it has an intuitive, user-friendly feel with a fresh, modern user interface. It also provided ECL with a better value, more cost-effective solution than its competitors.

Digitisation was a critical driver for implementation of quality and compliance software – there was a clear need for central governance around data quality and integrity, with the knowledge that good data into a system would deliver good reporting out the other side.

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How was Radar Healthcare implemented?

ECL knew that the implementation of new software would need more than just the IT infrastructure set up – with low digital literacy and organisational immaturity, a culture shift was required to replace pens, paper and spreadsheets with software that would automate a lot of the manual processes
in place at the time.

Radar Healthcare took a hands-on approach to implementation with the team from ECL participating in development days where the configuration specification was scoped. Best practice was shared across these workshops to ensure that ECL didn’t just transfer processes like for like onto the system but looked to streamline these and create efficiencies.

"Radar Healthcare are so helpful as an organisation and have some fantastic assets. The team really want to help you get the best out of the software and are always on hand to help and share best practice."

Fran Driver, Head of Quality and Corporate Governance at Essex Cares

How has Radar Healthcare supported ECL with quality improvement and compliance?

Radar Healthcare has reduced the amount of time required to have full visibility of quality and compliance across the organisation
Radar Healthcare has helped to identify key themes and trends i.e. health and safety concerns with the ability to triangulate data and deal with issues at a granular level
Radar Healthcare has encouraged a positive culture change in the organisation leading to continued quality improvement across all services
Radar Healthcare automates a number of tasks that previously took one full time administrative post to deliver
Radar Healthcare increased compliance with mandatory training requirements from 85% to the goal of 90%

"Radar Healthcare has provided greater visibility of all the good things about our service delivery by streamlining the compliments logging process, the number of compliments logged rose from 9 per year to 1500 per year! Being able to communicate this level of engagement from our services users has had a hugely positive effect on morale and encouraged our team to always strive for better performance."

Fran Driver, Head of Quality and Corporate Governance at Essex Cares

CQC inspection outcomes

Radar Healthcare functions	CQC inspection comment*
Incident management	“Accidents and incidents were analysed, any patterns or trends identified and action plans put in place to prevent reoccurrence, together with lessons learned”
Risk management	“Exceptionally robust quality and governance controls meant that the risks to the service were identified and mitigated quickly and that when errors did occur, lessons were learnt and shared to prevent reoccurrence.”
Audit management	“There was a range of audits in place to monitor the quality of the care delivered carried out by the registered manager and quality team for the provider”
Action and improvement plans	“The provider monitored a range of quality ‘performance indicators’ across its services. Where improvements had been identified through the auditing process, plans were put in place and action taken”
Workforce compliance	“Staff were provided with an ongoing programme of training delivered by the provider’s own in-house trainers which supported their knowledge and competence. Systems were in place to ensure staff received regular supervision, observations of practice and appraisals. This helped identify staff learning needs and supported their professional development.”
Document management	“The provider had a compliments, concerns and complaints policy, which outlined to people how and to whom they could address any concerns they had with the service”
Organisational process management	“The registered manager and clinical governance team had implemented robust systems and processes to monitor the quality of the service which were used to drive continual improvement.”

"Radar Healthcare has helped us be Outstanding!

Radar Healthcare has transformed the way we work. It has provided visibility and central governance around all areas of quality and compliance, enabling us to triangulate data to identify key themes and trends.

We know where our risks are. We know what the issues are, and we can react to them quickly. Five out of our six CQC regulated services are now rated ‘Outstanding’ in the well-led category and the Radar Healthcare reporting function has been instrumental in achieving this."

Fran Driver, Head of Quality and Corporate Governance at Essex Cares