The team at PSO found themselves working with stacks of paper files and maintaining a smooth operation between all of their locations was becoming more difficult. PSO needed a solution that was going to streamline their processes and make the lives of their staff easier and more efficient for their organisation.

Jo Sime, the Quality Advisor found there was a serious issue with having paper-based records “duplication of information needing to be reported in more than one place, taking lots of time, it was very costly as well, you need someone to print everything off and make the files up and keep it all together.”

Presbyterian Support Otago introduced VCare into the organisation in 2018. Quality Advisor Jo Sime worked closely with the VCare team to implement it into all of their homes. Their key focus was on comprehensive training at the beginning to ensure staff were confident with VCare before it was implemented.

Since implementing VCare, access to information has been improved significantly. Its use has sped up a number of processes with Jo stating “In terms of streamlining timing, especially with pre populating assessments, it makes it a lot easier. Assessments are prepopulated so when they go to do a report assessment, they only have to change a few bits rather than having to do a whole new assessment every time”

VCare was tailored to fit the needs of PSO, with Lynley finding that this was a major benefit of VCare. “We modified most of the VCare tools to match our paper ones, so people were familiar already with the forms they were using, they just had to find the electronic version of that.” The key to their level of success was the in-depth training. With Jo explaining “we did a lot of preparation beforehand with VCare and internally then did lots of in house”.

Recording and maintaining financial records has been significantly improved with VCare. Lynley commented that “From a financial point of view, we can extract information from VCare for invoicing, which has reduced a lot of spreadsheets and manual counting up. This has certainly streamlined these processes as well”. 

Staff are loving VCare Any-ware and it has bought the staff together as a team. Jo commented on the continuing support they receive from the VCare team “It’s the availability of the team in Christchurch and the responsiveness of them, I would certainly recommend VCare.”