Deputy supports the growth of Reliant Healthcare from 6 staff all the way to 180, providing home nursing and care services.

As a brand new business in 2013, it was critical for Reliant Healthcare to have a robust, easy-to-use, fully accessible staff scheduling and rostering system in place from the get-go.With its unique business model providing nursing care, care assistance, and general support services, Reliant Healthcare needed a system that empowered them to efficiently manage a pool of allied health and nurse specialists and carers. It needed to take control of the assignments and schedules of their clients.After a considerable search, Alexandra Conroy, Director and co-founder of Reliant Healthcare discovered Deputy, and now, five years on Alexandra explains how the online work scheduling tool has become integral to how she runs her business.

In a nutshell, Alexandra describes Reliant Healthcare as “a 5 year old business providing in home nursing and care services for anything from 3 hours to full time 24/7 service”.

Alexandra and her mother were adamant that they wouldn’t start until they had an adequate scheduling tool. Having worked in the healthcare industry for her whole life, Alexandra’s mother knew that there were a lot of sub par and expensive options out there.“We started the business on the floor of our living room and didn’t want to be tied to a bulky service or the paper submission of timesheets. We knew we needed a scheduling tool that would be user friendly, that would be able to work with us and would scale really well.”

To cater for the different needs of its clients, Alexandra was looking for a flexible and efficient platform. After a considerable search for the right tool after looking online and talking to other business owners, Alexandra stumbled upon Deputy. “I had a feeling early on that (Deputy) could do what we wanted. In this line of work, most of our staff had only experienced highly manual rostering systems. An Excel spreadsheet was about as good as it got. So we didn’t want to overwhelm them with a high-tech alternative.”

Having now been in business for over 5 years and growing to 180 carers and nurses, having the systems in place has been integral to the growth of Reliant. Alexandra says “Our systems underpin our ability to be organised regardless of what comes our way.”

Reliant makes use of the scheduling features to effectively manage their workers who don’t often come to into Reliant head office. “Two days are never the same at Reliant. We pride ourselves on being accessible, so when a client requests urgent help, we can respond without delay. For instance, Deputy provides us with a single, consistent view of our staff bookings and availability, jobs, and schedules.”

This information means that Alexandra and her back office team to work at speed. When a client requires urgent help, they can see immediately who from their team that works with a particular client is available to take the job. From there they make a request and the particular worker or workers respond with a click to accept or decline the shift. Reliant also use Deputy to help look after the wellbeing of their staff. Setting stress profiles ensures that no one is overworked. “We can keep an eye on staff fatigue, tenure, holidays and time off, which helps us run our business better and look after our staff.”

The integration with Xero has streamlined back office functions for Reliant. Alexandra explains “This integration means there’s no need to re-key data from one system to another. We don’t duplicate work, and we are fully confident in the quality of our data. This integration continues to save us both time and money and eliminates the chore of manual data entry and the associated errors.”