Walsingham Support: Coping with COVID

We spoke to Adam Paver-Merrison, Safeguarding and Data Protection Lead at Walsingham Support, about how Radar Healthcare helped them ensure they were still delivering safe and effective care throughout the pandemic. Walsingham Support are a charity which support adults with learning disabilities and autism. They started in 1986 and are based all over England, with services in South Wales too.

How did Walsingham Support cope before using Radar Healthcare to help with the pandemic?

They needed to keep track of the number of staff available at each location. It took time to collate this information as they have 89 service managers in England and a further 19 in Wales. This would be done through emailing each service manager every day and waiting for the response, which naturally could take some time! Delays in staff visibility could have lead to not enough care in some services and therefore safeguarding issues. They felt that they didn’t fully know the level of staff available each day and that live information would be much more useful – this is where Radar Healthcare came in. 

Was it easy to work with Radar Healthcare to onboard the COVID specific event?

Walsingham Support already use Radar Healthcare for almost everything they do. They realised that they needed a COVID-19 specific event to help support them, and worked with one of our Product Specialists to do just this. Within just 2 hours the event was personalised to fit their business processes for exactly what they needed. 

How did operations improve through Radar Healthcare?

Adam explained how Radar Healthcare allowed them to collate live information. As soon as a staff member filled in a form, all the relevant people in the company would know. Previously it would take days to get the information needed but now it takes minutes. One week, Walsingham had 80% of their staff off in one service; with Radar Healthcare they could immediately assign staff from other areas to cover and support them – ensuring they could keep up a high quality of support and care for their service users. 

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The COVID form on Radar Healthcare would cover the date a member of staff is off and a description. There’s a variety of reasons for their absence, not just illness, for example shielding or they were abroad. Adam was able to split these events into sub-categories making them easy to sort and report to the board. They were able to understand why the staff were off, detailed information, and how they could support them.

Using Radar Healthcare to track COVID testing

Walsingham set up a separate event for staff members to fill in a form once they had a test for the coronavirus. This meant that their managers could immediately see who had been tested, when, and what the result was. They have around 650 tests logged onto Radar Healthcare now, allowing them to audit which areas were receiving more tests than others. For example, London locations were being tested weekly, but some other areas such as Cumbria had been tested about once overall. Adam is able to map where they need to deliver more support in terms of tests so they can operate more fairly by influencing testing going forwards. 

What other features of Radar Healthcare have been helpful?

A feature which Walsingham are heavily using is the form editor. Adam pointed out that he especially finds notifications useful where he receives an email for higher risk form entries so he can contact the relevant managers to find out more information and take relevant action. 

Radar Healthcare’s product team likes to ensure customers are making the most of the system they have, and something Walsingham Support have recently discovered are that they can edit how workflows run based on the risk score of an event. They use events for nearly everything they do, and schedule tasks for things like vehicle checks and gas safety by the health and safety team. Their quality team uses audit functions too.

Walsingham used to carry out audits through spreadsheets which were emailed to managers. With over 100 services, this was hard to track and follow up on. Using Radar Healthcare, it is much less time consuming as managers are notified every month that they need to carry out an audit, and 2 weeks later if it has not been actioned, their managers are notified. It is then easy to run a report to see how audits have performed in different areas, meaning they can easily spot any issues and action them to keep a high quality of service for their users. 

Plans for Radar Healthcare in future

Adam stated that when they first onboarded Radar Healthcare, like with any new system, some managers weren’t too sure of the change. However, now they see the benefits and prefer this way of working. It helps managers when they have social workers visit their service as they can pull information from Radar Healthcare like the number of incidents with just a click, instead of sifting through paper.