A major health and welfare charity for the disabled is using Microsoft technology as a way to assist its staff in delivering enhanced support and care.
Along with both accommodation and care, Leonard Cheshire provides education with programmes designed to boost confidence and skills. It also delivers employment support and professional advice to people across the UK, Asia and Africa, and in 2018 alone the charity reached 46,000 individuals with its crucial work.
Microsoft technology at work for a good cause
Now Leonard Cheshire is aiding the thousands who make up its workforce to make use of Microsoft technology including Power apps, Power BI and Dynamic 365, to allow them to spend more time actively helping individuals in need and less time carrying out mundane administrative tasks like paperwork.
A platform based in the cloud, Dynamic 365 offers a wide selection of applications to businesses assisting with workloads in finance, customer service, sales, human resources, and marketing. The list of companies already utilising Dynamic 365 include BMW, Tesla, Centrica and Lego. In the earlier part of the year, the Tech for Social Impact Microsoft team revealed its very latest version of the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator. This suite of useful tools was developed especially for not-for-profit organisations to offer them the insight vital to attain their goals.
Digital transformation of a charity
Executive Director of Partnerships for Leonard Cheshire, Laura Crandley explained that most of the charity’s staff work in the social care sector, providing support on a daily basis to people. Their aim in using Microsoft technology is to enable these healthcare professionals to have more time alongside people they serve. Time-consuming staff rosters, for example, were once manual but are now moving to Dynamic 365.
She commented further:
“As part of our wider digital transformation, we are now using tablets to log things such as when they administer medication. We also have to do a lot of health and safety checks on equipment such as hoists. In a 30-bed care home, that’s a big task. Now, everything is tagged. Staff can swipe the tags and that’s logged into our system, so others can see if checks or services are overdue. Senior management can then see the history of those logs and investigate trends, if needed. Previously this was all done on paper, now it’s all digital.”
Latest government figures reveal that around 13 million people in the UK have reported one or more disabilities from 2017 to 2018. This is about a fifth of the population, 49% of whom cite mobility problems. The majority of these people are pensioners, with about 4% receiving some kind of care.
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