Interview with Community Care Connect

by Anna Dent

Anna Dent, Head of Research at Promising Trouble , spoke to Julia Darby, Director of Community Care Connect, a platform and approach that helps local communities to develop their own, locally appropriate model of homecare.

A white speech bubble with a scribble on a purple background

Anna

Julia, can you start by telling me where the idea for Community Care Connect came from? 

Julia

Community Care Connect grew out of my local community's experience of surviving in a care desert. Back in 2015, while I was living in northeast Dartmoor, [the area] was in market failure for social care, which means there were no regulated homecare providers that the local authority could commission to provide care at home. That was leading to some really appalling situations, from people getting stuck in hospital for up to three months at a time when they had gone in for a routine operation, to somebody getting stuck in the bath for three days. 

Our local Clinical Commissioning Group also began a consultation on closing the beds at our local Cottage Hospital, which they felt would be okay because, as they said, ”there will be care at home for everyone.” There was this huge [response] from the community, because [the community knew] there was no care for anyone at home. 

So we knew we had to do something urgently. We started with local community consultation and engagement, and we talked to social services and the GPs. We knew we needed to set up a regulated agency, but that was going to take a lot of time and money and so we also needed an interim solution that was quick. 

I saw these online platforms where people who were looking for care could type in their postcode, and it comes up with a list of all of the self employed carers in their area, and then it helps them get in touch; they're called Introduction Agencies. While I got on with fundraising for the startup costs for a new regulated agency, I also set up this really fast Carer Introduction Service for North East Dartmoor, introducing people needing care to self-employed caregivers in the area. 

The impact was amazing. The phone started ringing immediately. Within eight months, there were 1,000 hours of care happening every week. It also had a really nice impact in terms of local workforce development in this rural area, which typically has  a lot of part time and seasonal work. People who were underemployed were realising there was work they could do in their own village or in their neighbouring village. 

Anna

Did you manage all that through an online platform from the start, or did that come in later?

Julia

It was entirely analogue [to begin with]. I created a spreadsheet and tracking documents and lots and lots of paperwork. We got a lot of publicity for what we were doing following which organisations kept coming to me and saying, “we really liked what you did there, could you tell us how you did it”, or “could you come over here and do that on our patch?” Everything from a large hospice, to GP surgeries through to local community organisations, and even a nurse led startup. 

I then got funding from UnLtd to write a toolkit, a step by step guide to setting up and running your own Carer Introduction Service. As I was writing that toolkit, I looked back at the original inspiration, those online platforms that already exist, and I thought we could do something like that, but we could do it better. [We could] bring some more added value in around things like making the most out of peer support, and build that platform and incorporate all the tools that an organisation needs to run the service. So instead of all of the paperwork and a clunky database, that now all goes into the platform and organisations adopting the approach don’t need to spend lots of money replicating the tech. For us this was about democratising the tech and making it affordable to entry level organisations and even volunteer-led services.

Along with functionality that enables members to talk to each other, people seeking care or support at home can pop in their postcode, and choose their local connector organisation, and then they can find a carer that they like. They then use the platform to manage their care visits and the connector organisation uses the platform to support the payments and the billing cycle. 

For the organisations I'm supporting, in cities as well as rural areas, it's about extending their service offer to better meet the needs of their local communities, and it's about creating services that are earning them an income and using that revenue to support other services that don’t earn income, like befriending services.

Anna

it’s interesting to see that the tools that you've developed can be used in all sorts of different settings.

Julia

The main thrust of all of this for me is that communities themselves are the best placed to answer their own issues and design, develop, and ideally co-produce, their own services. Over the next 12 months, we're really focusing on getting the platform and our services to our customers absolutely top-notch whilst proving impact. For example, Bristol City Council are focusing on social care as a part of their Make it Local programme. For them, Make it Local in social care is about community wealth building and moving away from commissioning large commercial providers towards aiming that money towards their voluntary and community sector and supporting VCSE capacity building. 

We're currently focusing on getting the platform absolutely right, all the processes running as smoothly as possible, and on getting all the resources in place for connectors, care seekers and care workers. That will give us proof of concept, and we can then go out for investment to build the team. 

Anna

Would you see the platform having different impacts in different places, because it's shaped by the community?

Julia

What we've got on the platform are some fairly simple processes. We also give customers a lot of resources, but we encourage them to build a stakeholder group, and work with that group to support how they develop their service. One partner in South Devon, for example, wants to transform end of life care, so that service is focused on a specific community of interest and different pathways into the service.

Anna  

I was struck by what you're saying about your local version, and how that sounds like that's helped to make that place a more livable place, both for people that are working that need local flexible employment, but also people that live there that need care that would prefer to stay local, rather than having to move. There’s those two different aspects of how it makes a place more livable, more sustainable, more resilient. What is it about a community organisation that can help to improve a place?


Julia

Community organisations know their communities well and can feel more trustworthy and approachable to customers and end-users. It’s about relationship building and making connections between people at a neighbourhood level, where the people are the assets. I used to call it having a million cups of tea. Sitting down and just really getting to know people and where they were coming from and what they were after, or what they could contribute.

A lot of the practices of commercial organisations, particularly the large multinationals in social care, are extractive. The community model is the complete opposite: it becomes more than the sum of its parts. The value that comes out is so much more than financial. Building relationships with each other within communities is an antidote to poor mental health, declining physical health and a lack of access to services.

Anna

What's the experience of all these different groups in embracing the technology?

Julia

That's a really mixed picture. Our current model, which was funded by Power to Change, had two development phases. One was about a rapid prototype, the next was about bringing it up to full functionality. We also had to integrate some third party software and our early adopters have been with us on that journey. One of my early adopters is a single person organisation, and is somebody who is not particularly tech savvy, whereas another person in a different organisation is young and tech savvy — so their experiences are quite different. 

We are really focusing on getting it absolutely right for everyone and as simple as possible, because we recognise that unless it works very well for all the end users it's not going to work at all. 

[We looked at getting] a software development company to build a platform from scratch, where we would own the platform, and pay them on an ongoing basis to manage it. [And we looked at] hiring a development team and bringing them in house. But both those first two options were really long winded, and quite expensive.

And then our third option was to work with somebody who already had a platform that was close to what we wanted, but could retro-fit it for us. And that's when we started talking to Made Open: they have a platform which works in a number of different ways across a number of communities and places, and we really liked their values. Because it's retro-fitted, some of the processes aren't as sweet and smooth and straightforward as we would like, and we're constantly working with them to improve that. It might be that what we choose to do once we've got our proof of concept, is look for investment to actually build our own platform from scratch in a way that we can control more fully.  

Anna

What would help you to unlock more impact, more innovation? 

Julia

Funding and investment is a really key one. One of the things that would unlock impact would be around skills. I'm one of the last people you would expect to be running a community tech project and it would be great to have a head of tech on my team. It would also be good to get support around growth strategies, bringing the product to market, and designing the onboarding aspects.

One of my long term ambitions is about revolutionising social care in the UK, where communities are much more empowered and supported to create and own their own solutions around social care. 

Find out more about Community Care Connect.

Connected People and Places

Essays exploring how communities work with technology and innovation to shape better places.