Company: Florence Rota
Founder(s): Dr. Charles Armitage and Dan Blake
Website: https://www.florence.co.uk/
Description: Florence Rota is the UK’s first rota SaaS software designed entirely for care homes.
Florence Rota, developed in 2020, is the UK’s first rota SaaS software designed entirely for care homes – providing essential support through the Covid crisis and beyond. With 62% of care home managers saying their staff rota takes up the majority of their time per week (due to Covid-related absence, as well as social care’s 122,000-vacancy staffing gap), it’s never been more important for homes to maximise scheduling efficiency and put that time back in to focussing on care.
Care managers waste hours per day manually updating rotas in the form of paper calendars or excel sheets, as well as juggling phone calls and Whatsapp group notifications to find available staff. Or, they struggle with dated and confusing software packages that aren’t designed for care teams.
Florence Rota removes these problems by helping managers build rotas smoothly, in minutes. Staff are automatically texted daily shift invites, which they accept by tapping a link. The online rota is updated automatically in real time, with no chasing or constant rounds of manual editing needed from managers.
Another benefit of Florence Rota’s efficiency is it maximises the hours worked by permanent staff, instead of agency staff. Reducing agency staff movement between care homes is a key component of infection prevention in care homes during the coronavirus pandemic, and Florence Rota has helped care homes uphold this.
In fact, in December 2020, Florence Rota received a £140,000 Innovate UK grant as part of the government’s efforts to fund products to help the coronavirus recovery effort. Since then, over 1,000 active workers have been signed up to Florence Rota and are using the platform via their organisations.
In 2021, Florence Rota is adding HR tools to the platform to expand its value to care homes even further – including the ability to track absence, holidays and shift swaps. For Florence Rota, as with the other tech products under the Florence brand, the mission is to make working life easier for those working in social care.
As care home manager Michelle of Dene Grange care home in Northumberland states, “If it’s an emergency, normally I’d have to ring 50 people, so it makes a big difference – we’re [now] getting 75% shift of gaps covered.”
