People-centred transformation saves thousands of hours and improves care

Deputy has been in use for Lifeways team members for more than six months, helping the organisation to log more than one million care hours each month.

This partnership is not only saving thousands of hours for Lifeways but is also improving consistency of care for the people we support and making life easier for our team members.

Amanda Brooke, Chief Transformation Officer, helped Lifeways on the journey: “When I joined Lifeways in 2023, my team and I visited a lot of services and spoke to a lot of people from across the organisation about working here. We were looking for the really obvious things that would make a difference, not just for the people we employ but for the people that we support as well. Based on that, we developed a proposal for transformation which included better time management. At that point we didn't know which applications we would implement, we just knew what the challenges were and that solving them would have a huge impact.”

The challenges they found were causing hours of valuable time to be lost as managers took time away from the team and the people we support to keep on top of shift schedules.

Amanda said: “Printed rotas in our services would often get handwritten changes made to them. That information was then expected to be understood and inputted manually to the pay and billing system, which was wasting days of management time. We had no visibility of staff utilisation and high agency usage.”

With all this in mind, the team began looking for a solution and launched the tender. Digital time management systems are nothing new to the care sector, and there was a lot of interest from suppliers wanting to work with Lifeways.

Amanda said: “The key element for us was end user accessibility, especially with the app. We knew that if we couldn't get our team members on board with using it and if it wasn't easy to use, we were never going to make this change work.”

Deputy was chosen as the preferred provider based on user experience, and the team underwent an intense period of implementation, testing and piloting to be sure it would meet demands.

Amanda said: “We rolled out Deputy in around nine months to more than 9,000 staff in 1,100 services, so it was high-pace. We also found, through our pilot work, that we needed to work with Deputy to develop some new functionality to support multiple shifts rostering.”

This specific issue, where a support worker’s time needs to be allocated across multiple people we support but within the same shift, and billed accurately, led to the development of a special micro-scheduling tool.

Jamie Brown, People Services Delivery Manager, also worked on delivering Deputy and sees this challenge as a positive. He said: “One of the real bonuses of working with Deputy, given that we’re one of the first care providers to use it, is that they develop things specifically for us because we’re at the forefront. Improving Deputy like this could help other organisations too, which leads to better care across the sector.”

Using Deputy, Lifeways team members are submitting more than 170,000 timesheets each month and, due to having a much better view of shifts, agency use has also been significantly reduced.

Jamie said: “There’s always going to be some agency usage, and it’s important to remember that they do a great job of helping us when we need them. What we want to avoid is not being able to cover the shift with a familiar face to give the people we support consistency of care – that can be done with better planning and management of our rotas. The savings we’re making is all money that can be reinvested in our team members through training, facilities and more.”

Amanda agrees that having better foresight of shifts is helping to make life easier for team members. She said: “I was recently up in Scotland visiting an area manager who was looking after 14 services at the time. He told me that normally he’d create a roster for the month and then see all the gaps. Usually that would take him all day to phone round and see who could pick up the shifts and then worry about trading them. He said he pushed the button on Deputy and it put the notification out to everyone's phones and went to make a call about something else. By the time he came back, it was almost filled. It just allows people more time for the important things.”

Emma Seymour, Chief Financial Officer at Deputy, said: “This is what people-centred transformation looks like. By working closely with Lifeways to understand the reality of care delivery on the ground, we co-developed solutions - like micro-scheduling - that simplify complex rostering, reduce admin, and unlock thousands of hours that can be reinvested where they matter most: in consistent, quality care.

“What makes this partnership so powerful is that it’s not just about driving efficiency - it’s about making life easier for managers and support workers, and ultimately improving outcomes for the people they care for. That’s the kind of impact we’re proud to deliver at Deputy.”

Implementing Deputy is just one part of the overall transformation work happening across Lifeways to improve what we do both for our team and the people we support. For more information on transformation, visit Our Transformation Plan | Lifeways.