Overview
Helping Hands is a UK domiciliary care provider, delivering care to people in their own homes. Working both from the office and out in the field, and regulated by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the business depends on accurate, accessible documentation across everything it does.
Culverdocs helped Helping Hands digitise its forms and records across the business, replacing paper and standalone software with fully customisable digital forms the team builds and controls itself. The two have worked together for three years, after Helping Hands went looking for a paperless document solution and found Culverdocs online.
The Challenge
For a domiciliary care provider, documentation is constant. Care plans, audits, onboarding, day-to-day records, and much of it has to satisfy regulators. The turning point for Helping Hands came when it switched care-planning systems. The old system included an electronic document option that worked across the office and carers’ phones. The new provider didn’t, leaving a gap the business needed to fill quickly.
‘As we were moving from one care-planning supplier to another, the new provider didn’t offer an electronic document option, where the old one did.’ explained Gordon Willey Project & I.T Manager.
The business needed a solution that could:
- Provide fully customisable electronic forms the team could create and adjust themselves, without relying on the supplier.
- Support different grades of staff, with GDPR-driven permissions so people only saw what they should.
- Be set up quickly, to replace the capability they were losing.
The Solution
Rather than offer a completely off-the-shelf package, Culverdocs took the time to understand what Helping Hands needed and built around it. During evaluation, Culverdocs turned a document Gordon supplied into a working form, demoed it, then let him try building his own, which proved straightforward. He then decided to sign up with Culverdocs.
Culverdocs is now used across:
- Care documentation and care plans.
- Onboarding documents.
- Auditing and inspections.
- Day-to-day records.
- Vehicle checks.
Forms are branded in the organisation’s colours and logos for a consistent look. A web QR code option also lets the team capture one-off documents, like a financial audit for a service user, from anywhere.
The Impact
Accountability and Compliance
Digitised, searchable records give Helping Hands fast, reliable evidence, particularly valuable when demonstrating compliance to the CQC.
‘It helps with evidence for when CQC comes in. I can type in “staff audit”, pick the one I want and display it straight away. It’s quick and efficient to pull the information back out’
Significant Efficiency Gains
Faster completion, filing, and checking have cut the time forms take across the business.
‘I’d say it saves at least around 60%. The completion’s quicker, the filing’s quicker, and the checking is quicker. Once a form’s finished it goes straight to the right person and it’s already filed.’
Accessible Anywhere
Records that once sat on an internal server behind a VPN and couldn’t be read on a mobile device are now available wherever the team works.
‘Our documents used to need a VPN to read, and you couldn’t get to them on a mobile device at all. Culverdocs lets us access them without one. Everyone’s on laptops now, so even working remotely they can just get on.’
A Software That Adapts to You
Because Culverdocs builds and maintains the platform in-house, changes are quick.
‘If it doesn’t fit and needs a tweak, because you’re the developer, you can tweak it, that’s one of your biggest USPs. It’s not just in a box.’
The Results
Three years on, Culverdocs has become part of how Helping Hands runs, touching almost every area of the business and moving it close to its goal of working almost entirely paperless.
‘I highly recommend Culverdocs, especially in the care sector. The forms are easy to build and you can adjust them to anything you need. And the team are very, very supportive; in an industry that can be sharky, Culverdocs has never been like that. It’s always been friendly and normal, and you can have a proper conversation. You can’t just buy that.’ — Gordon Willey, Project & I.T Manager, Helping Hands.
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