Case Study: Thistle Healthcare Group

Since implementing Radar Healthcare, Thistle Healthcare – a care home provider operating services throughout Scotland – has seen demonstrable time and cost savings by consolidating and digitalising operational processes and procedures. This has led to an improvement in the quality of care they provide with improved Care Inspectorate gradings across the group.

Saving time and money

Having previously used multiple paper-based systems for the management of audits, accidents, incidents, and any other quality assurance-related activity, Scott Finnigan, Thistle’s General Manager highlighted how Radar Healthcare made processes much more efficient, effective and significantly improved the data integrity and reporting accuracy.

“Radar Healthcare saves us a huge amount of time reviewing and analysing quality and compliance data for events such as accidents and incidents or clinical data around wounds and medication errors. It would typically have taken two to three days per month for us work through all the data for each care home with information spread across ~300 emails but we can now gather and analyse all that data in less than a day which has allowed more time for us to focus on service support and the delivery of care; directly translating into significant cost savings across the group.”

Interested in Radar Healthcare?

Book a demo

Highlighting strengths

There’s often a tendency to use data to identify issues for corrective action but Radar Healthcare has also enabled Thistle to identify a number of key strengths within the organisation, in particular, highlighting how good they are at recording and executing action plans.

To balance complaints and concerns received, the ease of use of the system and the ability to share information across the organisation has encouraged staff to proactively log compliments which has significantly boosted morale.

Helping staff be more effective

It’s not just the intelligent reporting features that are helping. The easy navigations and user-friendly features are really helping staff across all locations to quickly and easily monitor and understand their performance. Julie Moore, Senior Support Manager said; “In my capacity as Home manager and also as a support manager I have found Radar Healthcare to be invaluable. The system is easy to navigate and definitely user friendly. The system enables the user to have oversight of all sorts of varied information relating to the service at your fingertips. In particular this year due to the COVID pandemic, it has been more difficult to move freely across all areas. However it has been possible to continue to monitor and support services remotely due to this system. I can confidently say that Radar Healthcare has made me more effective in my role.”

Deeper insights

The Thistle team has also been using Radar Healthcare to highlight areas for improvement. For example, how the use of agency staff impacts on quality indicators, such as medication errors and recording of incidents which was not something that would have been easily identified with the previous paper-based system.

This has been particularly important over the past few months, being that a large proportion of the team have been working remotely – Radar Healthcare has provided the ability to monitor performance without being on-site and enabled the management team to guide people through the relevant processes, digitally, where needed.

“Our experience of working with the Radar Healthcare team and using the software has been extremely positive. With the level of configurability Radar Healthcare provides, it feels like a bespoke system – there’s not a ‘one size fits all approach’ with Radar Healthcare, which is a problem you tend to find with many other systems of this nature; this has meant that we can iterate on demand based on user feedback and improve how we do things along the way.” Julie Moore, Senior Support Manager.