100,000 calls made (& counting) to support across Adult Social Care
This week our automated telephony service – Contact&Connect – celebrates a significant milestone in terms of supporting ASC services; 100,000 calls having been generated by the platform to 25,000+ service users.
The journey started five years ago, when we discussed the idea with a number of councils of being able to keep in touch with service users regularly and en masse. The idea was not only driven by improving feedback levels, but also from a preventative perspective, in terms of identifying people who may need further support or are hitting a crisis.
Our first Contact&Connect service – co-designed with Sunderland City Council – went live in September 2021, focused on driving the return of community loan equipment. Since then, we have developed services with a range of councils to support Reablement, Proportionate Reviews, Telecare, Complex and Children’s Wheelchair Services, the MHRA Patient Safety Alert, Unpaid Carers – with others in development.
Now across 10 live services, over 100,000 calls have been made to support people to live independently and safely at home. Where people identify that they are struggling, ASC teams are able to quickly make contact and offer support, where people have equipment to return, and colleagues are able to immediately arrange collections to improve the rate of turnover.
100,000 calls to 25,000 people, the sheer number of calls is impossible to manage without automation, and the impact of the calls is incredible. In some services there is quantifiable value, in others it’s far more qualitative. In many services the benefits are known, but in others they can be both unexpected and significant.
- In the Annual Review service the calls effectively triage people prior to moving through a proportionate review approach;
- In the wheelchair service we are able to help children think about the aspirations they have for their lives, and track their growth pattern to ensure they don’t outgrow their chair;
- Across the community loan equipment services we know that over £1,250,000 of equipment has been driven back into the system to date (and increasing every week);
- In the MHRA service, we can identify people who may have adapted or changed their bed, potentially putting themselves at increased risk from bed rails and levers;
- In the Reablement service we can generate alerts to inform the ASC duty team if someone has fallen or can’t take their medication;
- In the Telecare service we can report if an installation has not been undertaken correctly, or if someone does not know how to use the equipment;
- In Reablement we can identify when someone is struggling and organise a well timed confidence call which can result in them not returning to primary health services, such as the GP or going back to hospital;
- In the CQC service, we are able to understand levels of satisfaction with different care providers, whether people have the same pool of carers and whether they arrive on time.
100,000 calls to 25,000 people and a 64% unique response rate. It’s of a level of engagement councils strive for and can now achieve and evidence. Indeed, two of our partners have recently been informed by the CQC of their upcoming inspection dates, and the data from their Contact&Connect services has been included in the Self Evaluation Framework (SEF) Report to evidence service user engagement. We shall be reporting on this further in Autumn 2024, so watch this space!
If you have any questions, thoughts or would like to know more about our automated telephony approach, do drop us a line.
