Cosgrove Care Delivers Personalized Support to More Communities with Skedulo
For people with complex needs, Cosgrove Care helps them to have the same opportunities as everyone else in their communities. With their diverse breadth of services, Cosgrove was unable to grow the communities they served due to cumbersome, manual processes. Skedulo’s mobile workforce management solution enabled Cosgrove to save time in setting up appointments and provide relevant information to caregivers while on the go, leading to increased operational efficiency and the ability to better serve their communities.
About Cosgrove
Based in Glasgow, Scotland, Cosgrove Care helps people with additional needs to live more independently in their communities and maintain good health and wellbeing. They provide support with education and employment opportunities to adults, as well as administer home care services and assist with participation in local community activities. Cosgrove also enables children with additional needs to develop social skills and provides advice to families on how to best support their children. Cosgrove aims to improve the lives of people with additional needs and their families so that they have the same opportunities as everyone else.
The Challenge of Delivering Personalized Care
Cosgrove’s core promise is to provide personalized support to people of all ages, wherever and whenever they may need it. This ranges anywhere from after school care and overnight stays with children and their families to group learning, employment support, and assisted home living for adults. Cosgrove’s team of caregivers visit these people anywhere from a few times a day to longer-term support arrangements over the course of weeks. Because the needs of supported individuals can change frequently, Cosgrove’s challenge is to ensure that their staff can deliver highly personalized care efficiently and consistently in any location or environment.
Since their caregiver staff travels to support people at all times of the day, Cosgrove found it difficult to know what was happening in real time with their employees at these appointments. Information for both adults and children was stored in a system that was primarily designed for nursing homes. It took the scheduler team multiple days to set up appointments for the upcoming weeks, manually recording information in spreadsheets with no easy way to access information while away from a computer. Then prior to a visit, caregivers had the additional challenge and burden of gathering basic details to notes on past visits and individuals’ preferences, in order to prepare for the support needed.
After each visit, caregivers didn’t have a single, trusted place to record the individual preferences and customized notes, which made it difficult to deliver consistent and personalized care in future appointments. Lacking the efficiency to scale, Cosgrove could not grow to serve more people in the community despite high demand for their services.
Compromising on quality or the variety of services offered was not an option to improve operations. “We needed to solve some of the inefficiencies in our organization. We knew we were growing and we knew to take the organization forward — we had to move our systems forward,” said Pauline Boyce, Director of Strategic Development. Cosgrove needed a better way to manage their dynamic, complex operations and put the right information into their caregivers’ hands.
