The Challenge
Birchwood Lodge had a turnover problem that will sound familiar to anyone running a care home. Not because the care was poor, but because the sector itself is relentless. Staff left. New staff came in. And every single time, the registered manager found herself buried in the same mountain of tasks. Printing and posting contracts. Chasing candidates for right to work documents. Manually initiating DBS checks and then following up when nothing came back. Emailing training links one by one. Setting calendar reminders for a 30-day check-in she would inevitably miss because something more urgent had taken over. Remembering to flag the 90-day probation review before it crept up on her. With a staff turnover rate sitting above 25% and a home of 24 beds to run, she was onboarding someone almost every month. Each new starter was consuming hours of her time spread across their first few weeks, time taken directly from residents, from governance, from everything else the role demanded. Nothing was falling through the cracks deliberately. It was just a system held together by one person's memory, and that is never a safe place to be.
Our Strategy
We built Birchwood Lodge a staff onboarding app that now sits at the centre of every new hire process. The moment an offer is accepted, the manager opens the app and enters the new starter's basic details: name, role, start date, and contact information. From that single action, the entire onboarding sequence fires automatically. A digital contract is sent for e-signature. A right to work document request goes out the same day. The DBS check link is triggered with clear instructions. A welcome email lands in the new starter's inbox with everything they need to know before day one. Mandatory training modules are assigned and delivered automatically, covering safeguarding, moving and handling, infection control, fire safety, and the Mental Capacity Act. A 30-day check-in and 90-day probation review are both scheduled and flagged to the manager without her needing to remember either. Every completed step updates the app in real time. The manager logs in and sees at a glance exactly where every new starter is in the process, what is complete, what is outstanding, and what is overdue. Every action is timestamped and stored, which means when a CQC inspector asks to see staff files, everything is already in order. The manager now spends under 10 minutes on the administrative side of bringing someone new in. The process runs itself from there.
The Results
of manager time saved per new starter
of compliance steps completed on time, every time
