About Calsa Care
Location and Surroundings
Vicarage Court Care Home is situated in North Featherstone, Pontefract. It is ideally located between five local towns and just off the M62. This makes it easily accessible from Wakefield, Leeds, Bradford, York, and beyond. The Home sits on a large 3-acre site, with 2 acres dedicated to beautiful gardens surrounded by idyllic Yorkshire countryside. Nearby amenities include a post office, public house, and various shops. Visitors benefit from ample free car parking at the front of the Home.
History and Services
Since 1983, Vicarage Court has been a well-established Residential Dementia Home within the local community. In 2014, it expanded to include a general nursing unit and a general residential unit, broadening the scope of care it offers.
Family Ownership and Resident Care
The Singh Family, proprietors of Calsa Care Ltd and Vicarage Court Care Home, maintain daily personal contact with residents to ensure they meet each individual’s needs.
Experienced Management Team
The management team brings a wealth of experience to the Home. Helen, the Nurse Manager, has been a nurse since 1980 and has over three decades of nursing home management experience. She has cared for residents with extensive nursing needs, brain injuries, complex care, and dementia.
Dorothy, the Head of Clinical Care, has a diverse background, primarily working in the NHS as a nurse practitioner and ward manager. Over the last 10 years, she has worked in the private sector as a clinical nurse specialist, supporting young disabled and elderly residents.
Together, their expertise covers a wide range of conditions. These include Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, brain injuries, obesity, diabetes, ventilated patients, epilepsy, dementia, stroke, and many other care needs.
Staffing and Training
The Home provides 24-hour RGN cover and employs two unit managers to oversee the dementia, young physically disabled, and residential units. This ensures senior staff availability at all times. All staff receive ongoing training—both mandatory and specialist—with many holding formal qualifications such as NVQs.
Recognition and Reputation
In 2014, the Home earned the “Employer of the Year” award from Wakefield College. Since then, relatives have consistently rated it as one of the top nursing homes in Yorkshire.
Multi-Disciplinary Care Approach
Vicarage Court actively participates in a multi-disciplinary team. Staff collaborate closely with GPs, district nurses, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, and podiatrists. They also work with dentists, opticians, hearing aid specialists, and many other care professionals. This teamwork ensures residents receive comprehensive, personalised care tailored to their individual needs.
The care home motto is
“When excellence becomes tradition, greatness knows no limit.”
The Challenge
Operating 24/7 and with 120 employees across eleven departments, they need to schedule more than 2500 hours of work per week. This represented as much as 65% of their income as a cost. It was therefore essential for them to have control and awareness of who is working and who is able to work. This ensures the right skill mix of staff is on shift. They keep the residents safe whilst remaining within budget.
The admin team spent days planning and preparing budgets. They also printed rosters for staff to take home, scheduled temporary changes, and tracked absenteeism. Then they calculated timesheets. With an expanding facility, it was essential to streamline this process and free up some administrative time.
In addition to rostering, Calsa Care also wanted a system that will help with the following:
- Group staff into different teams
- Live emailed alerts on no shows, early leaves, lateness and overtime.
- Record employees worked hours using fingerprint biometric recognition hardware. This improves accuracy, eliminates buddy clocking, and prevents people from forgetting cards or fobs.
- Reporting tools and audits on activities and role changes in the business. For example, someone working as a care assistant in the day and as a kitchen assistant in the afternoon. This was in order to track and record different hourly rates for payroll preparation.
- Track paid and unpaid breaks at different times in the day.
- Prepare employee worked hour data into an exportable csv or excel file. This allows uploading into a payroll system or bureau.
- Self-Servicing features for employees to provide a digital schedule that is always up to date and accessible from home.
The Solution
Chronicle Online was developed by people with over 30 years combined experience in workforce management. The Chronicle product suite was designed specially to address all the challenges a typical Care or Nursing Home faces.
Chronicle Scheduling helps businesses roster the right people in the right place at the right time.
Chronicle Budgeting tools help manage staffing levels in either hours, headcount or monetary values. Showing you clearly plans vs budgets and actuals vs plans.
Biometric terminals from Chronicle provide peace of mind by ensuring no buddy clocking occurs in a 24/7 environment.
The Holiday, Sick, and Absence planning tools enable accurate reporting of incidents, statistics, and live information.
An online database within Chronicle HR stores employees’ contracts, appraisals, disciplinary records, history, skills, and training records.
Employees benefit from Chronicle Self Servicing, which allows them to view rosters, track worked hours, and check holiday, sick, and absence entitlements.
With Activity and Cost Centre tracking, people can work in different roles. Time is logged against various business areas, helping prepare accurate payroll output.
Exports enable the business to produce a custom CSV file at the click of a button. It is formatted correctly for direct import into payroll. This avoids inaccuracies, overpayments, and reduces administrative time.
The Process
The implementation process was broken down into three parts.
- The Setup and Configuration – Activating the live environment, releasing the URL and username/password. Importing all the employee details, building and defining the working rules, budgets and shift patterns. Setting up all the holiday sick and absence entitlement. Tagging employees to the correct roster, activity and department.
- The Installation and Commissioning includes installing the hardware, checking it communicates properly, defining the IP address or DCHP settings, and enrolling the employees.
- The Training and Bedding IN – Online training for an hour at a time provided remotely over a period of weeks. This helps give the best results and system users the opportunity to absorb the training at a manageable rate.
“Rostering and budgeting in the home is so much easier. With the self-servicing features, it means my colleagues can see their roster digitally.”
Helen Thom, Registered Manager Calsa Care
The Technology
Biometric Clocking Terminal Chronicle Online / Self Servicing
In summary, the Chronicle Online product is a great option for privately run businesses to plan and control their staffing levels and wage bill. Utilizing the latest cloud-based technology, it is also viable and affordable for businesses with minimal IT infrastructure.
“The Chronicle product lives up to its promise and expectation. The team have provided a fantastic level of support and attention to detail at key moments.”
Gurdip Singh, Managing Director
Calsa Care
About Chronicle Computing
Chronicle Computing was established to provide small, medium, and large companies the most functional, robust and affordable Cloud-Based Workforce Management System in the UK.
Specialising in Time and Attendance, Access Control, HR and Scheduling Solutions. Chronicle Computing has extensive experience in managing, implementing, configuring, installing and training users on WFM systems.
Chronicle Computing Ltd
Telephone: 07401578527
Freephone: 0800 1073284
Email: [email protected]
Mission Statement – ‘To provide an affordable, simple and robust web-based workforce management system that users can prepare a payroll run with and extract management information, critical to a successful organisation.’
