Meet Sue

It all started in 2014. While working as a nurse at St Vincent’s Private Hospital, Sue was asked by a family to help organise 24-hour care for their elderly mother. Wanting to help more people, Sue’s business was born: Sue’s Home Care.

The family-owned and operated business prides itself in providing an all-in-one support service to people of all ages and needs. Now in its seventh year of operation, Sue’s Home Care employs over 100 people across Sydney and has been growing consistently since it started.

Today, Sue draws together over 30 years of experience in the health sector. She manages strategy, and operations within her business. She’s also a member of the UTS Endowed Chair of Ageing.

The challenge 

Operating and building a business has had many challenges, and for Sue the big ones were: rostering inefficiencies and clunky performance monitoring. 

“It was a nightmare,” says Sue, describing her reliance on a double paged diary when first starting out. We had minimal visibility over what was happening on the ground. Many of the operational tasks were time-consuming and inefficient. Like manual rostering, scheduling changes, payroll, creating progress notes through PDF documents and emails, organising folders of information, and keeping personal data safe.

“We were desperate for a solution that was tailored to meet our needs. It needed to be intuitive, mobile and come with a responsive help desk,” she says.

In 2016, it was time to say goodbye to the paper planner and hello to ShiftCare.

The solution

Being an all-in-one support service with complex backend processes, Sue’s Home Care needed a robust online platform with many features to match.

“We looked around for a long time for a platform we liked, and we loved ShiftCare’s interface. From there, the rest is history,” says Sue. 

ShiftCare now assists Sue’s Home Care across rostering, performance monitoring, invoicing and compliance.

ShiftCare provides a framework to allow you to pretty much grow. Each month, we’re still growing and ShiftCare just mops up all that growth.

A star feature: Progress Notes

Sue’s favourite ShiftCare features are progress notes and the access support plans:
“All of our staff have access to our detailed support plans which outline what our clients needs are and the framework where each staff member writes notes at the end of each service. This means we know exactly what’s happening with all of our clients in real time. We can rapidly forward this feedback in a responsive format to partner organisations and family members, whether they’re located locally or overseas.”

Progress notes has also enabled Sue’s Home Care to engage more meaningfully with families:
“We do a lot of work with people who’ve got short-term memory issues and if you were to ask some of them at the end of the day what they did at the beginning of the day, they can’t remember. Progress notes and the flexibility of being able to upload photos provides comfort and a lovely talking point for families.”

The big saviour: scheduling

Another huge benefit to Sue is ShiftCare’s scheduling capabilities; she has gained control and peace of mind that staff are where they are meant to be at the time they are meant to be there.

“With the number of employees and clients we have now there is no way we could operate the way we used to. ” Payroll and invoicing has gone from being a time consuming process which was open to errors to a quick, easy and reliable system. 

Looking ahead

Sue’s Home Care was one of ShiftCare’s first partners, and the two businesses have been expanding alongside each other ever since. Thinking about her business journey, Sue wraps it up: “ShiftCare has provided us with a framework that has allowed us to continually grow.”

Coming up, Sue has just been approved as a NDIS registered provider. Operating on solid business foundations, Sue’s Home Care can only easily grow as part of this vibrant network to support even more people in need.