Care Plan Planning - Write Back to Care Plan

Care Plan Planning - Write Back to Care Plan

This article follows on from the previous one which explained one method of building an effective Care Plan Planning screen. For the benefit of those who have navigated straight here, I shall repeat some of the same info about what the Care Plan Planning screen is and why having an effective one can be of benefit. 

The Care Plan Planning Screen is where you tell the system what care your Clients need, and what the baseline plan in terms of timing for that care looks like. 

Essentially, the care that you plan here becomes your baseline. Each week the Visits for the Client will be booked into the Visit Schedule/Rota for you based upon this. It’s often referred to as a ‘master plan’ or a ‘stamp’. 

Additionally to the Visits and their planned times, the system can also allocate Workers based upon the information in this baseline. The bottom half of the Care Plan Planning screen (where the calls are laid out) has a Worker column. If a name is present in this column the system will attempt to Allocate the Visit to this Worker, meaning it appears on their Rota without further intervention. If the Worker is still Available (isn’t off work, sick, on holiday or busy elsewhere) this will be successful and the Worker will be allocated. 

This screen really holds the key to success for the entire system. Having a well-planned baseline, with as many Workers (called ‘Preferred Workers) in this baseline as possible means that getting to a finalised rota on a weekly basis should be quick and easy, with you only having to deal with occasions where Workers are on holiday or sick etc. and a replacement needs to be found. 

Both this and the previous article aim to explore two different but equally valid ways to get to the same end – a well-planned baseline. 

It is worth mentioning at this point that this is JUST a baseline. The fact that the baseline produces a Visit on the rota for Monday at 9am does not mean that it can’t just be simply amended to a different time in the Visit Schedule if it needs to be, the same being true for Workers it allocates. If one worker, or the time of one Visit, needs to change, there is no sense in amending the baseline/master plan for this. What you want to do is enter the details of where the Visits will be MOST of the time. They can always be amended as a one off. 

This article will look at what could be described as a much quicker method of entering an effective Care Plan, although it also has a few more distinct steps to get to a complete baseline as you will not be entering Preferred Workers from the Care Plan Planning screen, but from the Visit Schedule instead and then asking the system to ‘write back’ what you do to the care plan. It does, however, mean that your Care Plan/baseline will be complete by the time you finish, just like the other method. 

• Start by Navigating to the Client > Care Plan Planning Screen
• The top section of the screen displays Care Plans themselves, which is basically a list of Contracts that the Client has. The bottom section, called ‘Plan Visits’, deals with the when and where of normal recurring care, and is where you set the baseline
• Click New under Care Plans and enter the Care Plan Properties
• Ensure you select the appropriate Contract, as this contains information about who to invoice for the care you are generating.
• Ensure the Start Date reflects the first day of your working week.
• Click OK to save the Contract. If a Client has several Contracts you can just repeat this process (e.g. once for Private and one for Social Services)
• Click New under Plan Visits
• This is where the important information is held. This is about when your Client has care, as you will need to enter information about the delivery of that care needs to happen. You are going to be able to select multiple days for when the Care occurs at once, so think about what Time blocks the client has. For example, if they have 9am Care on a Monday-Friday then 10am Care at the weekend, you will need 2 entries. One for the 9am’s and one for the 10’s.
• Start by selecting which Visit Type suits the Visits you are planning. E.g. Personal Care. The Visit Types will be in a dropdown for you to select. Again, if the Visit type is different on different days you will need multiple entries
• Set the Preferred Times for the Visit, e.g. 9am, and set a Duration for the Visit. You may wish to ensure this matches with the policies provided by the funder. Remember, we’re entering the time they have care on a Monday.
• Click the Recurrence Tab (which is where you can select days on which this care occurs)
• Choose a Start Date for the recurrence which reflects the first day of your working week.
• Select Occurs Weekly and select on which days the care recurs, in this case tick Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
• Select the Tasks Tab and click new to add specific Tasks that will need to be performed by the worker attending the Visit. Certain Tasks will require a worker to have corresponding training and capabilities in order to be rostered to the Visit. Tasks will be applied to all Visits across the week.
• Click OK to save the recurrence, you will see that the 9am Visit is entered, occurring Weekly on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
• The trick is to repeat this method for all different times in which the Client needs care. You can take a shortcut by right clicking on a planned Visit and clicking ‘Copy’. This creates a replica that you can simply enter and amend quickly rather than starting from scratch.
• The above example of 9am Mon-Friday and 10am at the weekend will require two lines for the entire package, much quicker than the previous method.
• However, the drawback here is that there is not a separate Worker box for each individual day, and it’s unlikely that the same Worker will work on every single day. To solve this problem we need to book the care plan into the rota for the first time. This means that the Visits get copied into the Visit Schedule, and they will go in without a Worker allocated as there is no preferred Worker set
• To book Visits click the ‘Book Visits’ button. Enter a date to book up to and press Ok. Then navigate to the Visit Schedule.
• Allocate each Visit one by one, each time asking the system to Write back the Worker to the Care Plan. Remember to do this one day at a time (i.e. choosing just the single day each time in the prompt box).

There is much more detailed information on this in the next article. The upshot is that each time you write back to the Care Plan and choose just the single day, the Care Plan Planning screen will automatically split that day out into its own line complete with its own Preferred Worker box. By the time you get to the end of the week for that client the care plan will have as many entries as if you’d put them in using the longer winded method, only you have not had to put them in individually!