CARE Waitakere Trust is a group of passionate people who provide crucial social services to Auckland's Te Atatu Peninsula community. CARE stands for Coming Alongside to Restore and Empower.
They began back in 1999, offering high quality, professional counselling services to anyone needing support, whether or not they could pay the full fee. Over the years, demand for their service has grown, and extra funding has allowed them to expand the team to over 50 people.
Today they offer a holistic range of services to support their community's wellbeing, including counselling, budgeting, family support, and food assistance.
A rapid increase of those in need
CARE Waitakere have a strong presence in their local community, and over the years have observed an increasing demand for their services. Operations and Technology Manager, Laura Fear, explains: "Since we have been growing so quickly we needed to find a way to reduce our overheads and administrative tasks."
Many of CARE’s services have a waiting list, and their clinicians work hard to ensure clients are seen as quickly as possible. It is imperative that CARE Waitakere doesn't place heavy administrative demands on these clinicians, as this takes time and focus away from client work.
“What's really valuable about Noted is that we can reduce our overheads and decrease the time our clinicians spend taking notes and booking sessions. With Noted, it'll be faster, easier and provide more accurate data collection into the system. This will free up time for our clinicians as well as our admin team.”
Kathy Clist CEO, CARE Waitakere
Efficiently working together for greater community wellbeing
The teams at CARE Waitakere work closely together to address the needs of people in their community. This means some clients receive support across a number of services, often leaning on a range of expertise within the team. This type of shared care is common in social service organisations, as complex issues in the community benefit most from a wraparound service.
With Noted, CARE Waitakere will have the tools to efficiently and confidentially work together to improve the lives of their clients. Access controls and Teams features within Noted ensure that client information and progress is only shared between those who are giving CARE and support. By providing the right information to clinicians, they can work together to effectively provide the best support possible to their clients.
Processes to ensure growth and continued support
CARE Waitakere's previous system for client management did not provide a seamless process for data extraction and reporting. Unfortunately, they had become dependent on writing SQL scripts to manage their data. This posed a business risk and caused frustration by having so many workarounds that relied on a specific skill set.
"We wanted a process where we had no skill dependency and were able to share duties between our administrative team more easily. Noted will help us achieve this." Laura Fear, Operations and Technology Manager
To ensure the growth and continued support to their community, CARE Waitakere has decided to migrate their client management onto the Noted system. This removes the need for SQL technical skills and allows multiple people to access and draw down data for easier reporting and faster operational decision-making.
An intuitive and easy to use system
Not only did CARE Waitakere have to ensure the new system would remove their skill dependency risk and create efficiencies, it had to be easy to use.
The previous system was a struggle for staff, who are already under pressure to serve their clients, so a hard-to-navigate system burdened them with additional stress and required a lot of training for staff when they joined CARE.
They didn’t think anything else would be better than their current system, but decided to have a look around anyway to see what was out there. Luckily, they stumbled across the Noted website and signed up for a trial account.
“After exploring Noted we realised the simplicity of the interface and how easy the workflows are. This was really appealing to us.”
Laura Fear Operations and Technology Manager, CARE Waitakere
A system to support their clinicians
During their trial of Noted, Laura Fear said "I could see it was going to save our clinicians a lot of time."
Seamless ACC billing
The ability to seamlessly bill ACC directly from the Noted system is a huge benefit to CARE Waitakere. They are working more and more with ACC Sensitive Claims, and this feature is a huge time-saver.
Record client relationships
Noted provides the ability to link clients together in meaningful ways. With relationship tags, whānau records, and group records, it's easy to link clients to one another in the system.
Faster client intake
CARE Waitakere discovered the Client Invite feature provided an efficient way to get basic information from a new client into their system quickly and seamlessly. Which meant they would spend less time asking basic questions during a client session.
Surface client records faster
The data structure's simplicity was also a highlight for CARE Waitakere. Being able to easily search the entire client base using one search bar means they can quickly and efficiently discover client records.
Shared reporting
Laura was thrilled she could set up a report in the system and someone else can log in and run that exact same report again. Removing tedious SQL activities and allowing the team to access the information they need means data is far more searchable on a day-to-day basis in an automated way.
CARE Waitakere are about to embark on their onboarding journey with the Noted team and will soon be up and running on their new system to continue to provide compassionate social services to the Te Atatu Peninsula community.
If you are wondering how Noted can support your social service – reach out to our team today for a discussion about your needs.
