Aspen Hill Village care home runs smoothly with Deputy

Specialising in providing nursing with dementia care, Aspen Hill Village is one of the biggest care homes in Leeds, UK, with 242 staff and beds and service for up to 180 residents. It’s part of a group of five care homes operated by Armighorn Capital, which is run by Navjot Singh and his partner Shahzada Ahmed. Their strategy is simple. “It’s all about creating a better experience for residents and staff,” says Navjot. “We’re passionate about ensuring we provide care to the very highest standard.”

Armighorn Capital specialises in buying under-performing or closed care homes and bringing them up to the highest standards required by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), England’s regulator for health and social care. Navjot achieved this with the very first care home he bought. Having previously been shut down by the regulator, it went on to achieve the CQC’s highest rating.

Streamlining the operations so they work as smoothly as possible is at the heart of Navjot’s approach, which is why he has rolled out Deputy across all care homes in the group.

Aspen Hill Village had previously used a paper-based system to manage staff timesheets and schedules. It was down to the line manager to record all employees’ hours and to manually create schedules for everyone. Completed timesheets were then manually added into a central system, creating inevitable errors. And as if that wasn’t difficult enough, managers then had the complexity of overtime rates to deal with, which consumed more precious time.

As Navjot says, “This was just the kind of inefficiency we couldn’t afford. When you’re ‘all hands on deck’ and dealing with different issues across the business, it’s very disruptive to be tied up doing admin tasks like these the old-fashioned way.”

Introducing Deputy at Aspen Hill Village quickly began to make a difference.

“Deputy makes everything so much more visible and easy to manage,” says Navjot.

The move away from a paper-based system for recording time and attendance immediately reduced the number of errors, with staff now clocking in using tablets. And with Deputy’s scheduling capability, Aspen Hill Village could automate rotas, saving line managers hours of tedious admin work.

And the benefits continued. Aspen Hill Village uses Deputy to integrate staff timesheets with its payroll system, reducing the number of errors during monthly payroll and automating overtime rate calculations. Admin staff now only have to field one or two payroll queries each month, rather than the 39 that they typically received with the old manual system.

All of this means more efficiency and better management. “On timesheet inaccuracies alone, Deputy saves us between £2,000-£5,000 each month,” says Navjot. “And it makes everything so much more visible and easy to manage. We use Deputy’s customised access levels so that line managers can create shifts and central managers can have an overview of everything that’s going on.”