Be Caring are Business Culture Award 2020 Finalists in two categories; Best Medium Business and Culture in a Crisis.

We’re up against some impressive organisations, including; NFU Mutual, the Mnistry of Defence and Volkswagon Group UK, we’ll find out Tuesday 25th and Wednesday 26th November if we’ve been successful in either category...

Culture in Crisis – Our Covid Response

Throughout the last 9 months, our team have adapted, worked hard, and pulled together to ensure we have been able to provide reliable, quality care throughout this worrying time. We are so grateful to our dedicated and passionate team of Care and Support workers who have worked tirelessly, and continue to do so daily. Our culture, values and leadership have been some of the cornerstones of our ability to deal effectively with the challenges we have faced, and we are really proud of what our colleagues have worked together to achieve.

As a senior leadership team, we wanted to cultivate a safe environment, in which all our leaders and office teams were able to share their challenges and promote any learning and scaling of best practice. We increased and established new communications at all levels of the organisation, focusing on PPE guidance, Covid testing, social distancing, infection control measures and personal wellbeing.

“Our priority has been making sure the people we support, and our colleagues safe. Throughout the pandemic, our colleagues have come together to support each other, and have gone above and beyond for those we support, and their families, particularly those who needed to shield or self-isolate. We know the sacrifices some of our wonderful colleagues have made, putting service users first, before their own families. I’m so proud of every one of our colleagues.”

– Sharon Lowrie, Be Caring CEO.

We have faced the inescapable challenges of dealing with Covid-19, and keeping our employees and our service users safe. Thanks to the diligent, hard work of our Care and Support workers, we’ve had some lovely feedback from our service users and their families throughout the Covid-19 period. One service user’s daughter wrote to us to say:

“Just to say thank you very much for keeping a consistent service over this difficult time with Care Workers having to isolate and everything, there has never been a missed visit which is excellent. Thank you.”.

The coronavirus is still very much a global threat, so we remain vigilant, and are actively keeping everyone’s safety and wellbeing a high priority. We’re delighted to be able to share with you a range of reports and newsletters, which draw down on our progress, experiences and developments over the Covid-19 period. We hope these publications will offer a unique insight into life at Be Caring throughout the pandemic. These reports and newsletters can be accessed at the bottom of Our Covid Response page on our Annual Review website

Best Medium Business – Our Achievements

We’re incredibly proud of the progress we’ve made over the past 18-24 months. As an employee-owned social enterprise we wanted to make sure we laid foundations for progress, getting the basics right, establishing a new leadership team that would promote a culture of honesty, openness and challenge.

All our services are rated Good by the CQC – Three of 4 of our services were inspected in 2019, two of which had been rated ‘requires improvement’ at last inspection for breaches of Health and Social Care Act 2008 regulation. Our priority when taking on the transformation of our culture, was to ensure we achieved a ‘Good’ rating across all our services. We know that these ratings demonstrate that we’re delivering an effective and effective and consistent level of care, adhering to national standards and ensuring we’re recruiting to provide care to meet people’s needs – but we will not be stopping at ‘Good’ – we believe we’re already making good progress towards ‘Outstanding’ and will be ready for the next round of inspections.

We’ve worked with Commissioners to Develop new Care and Funding Models – we’ve developed funding models that are both cost-effective, and challenge the status quo – models that are often built on principles of; collaboration and partnership with commissioners, trust, shared risk and open-book accounting.

We’ve developed our information intelligence – our data is crucial to effective decision making. Ensuring we had accurate, useful and timely data has been essential to helping us significantly improve the quality of our services, as well as enabling our local managers and colleagues to make timely, informed decisions – focusing on the right things at the right time.

We’ve achieved 13% growth within existing contracts – our focus over the past 2 years was to both consolidate and secure our existing services. This meant delivering on contracts and services where we able to achieve the growth and delivery required to be financially viable and sustainable. We successfully secured contracts in Liverpool, Manchester and North Tyneside to maintain three of our existing services, whilst also gaining two supported living services in Newcastle: Allendale Court and Augusta and Holmes Dementia Care Bungalows.

Find out more about our achievements and our future plans at our Annual Review website