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Magic Notes for adult social care – Swindon Borough Council

The council piloted AI in adult social care to improve the quality and speed of recording of assessment conversations by their frontline workers. Using a tool called Magic Notes, specifically developed for this purpose by social enterprise Beam, council staff have been able to reduce admin time by 63%, freeing up more time for vital conversations with the people supported by adult social care.

Challenges

Increasing demand on council services means capacity of frontline staff is tighter than ever.

For Swindon Borough Council, this has meant that time-consuming administrative tasks like manually recording assessment conversations and logging records takes valuable time away from social workers. For those staff with learning difficulties or protected characteristics these impacts are compounded, and ultimately this prevents social workers from better directing their expertise and efforts on person-centered conversations.

Approach

Swindon Borough Council partnered with Beam, a social enterprise focused on supporting disadvantaged groups and developing cutting edge technology for frontline workers.

‘Magic Notes’ allows social workers to automatically generate high-quality, detailed assessments customised for specific teams, liberating frontline staff from admin time and allowing them to focus their efforts more on the conversation.

Swindon trialled Magic Notes across 184 frontline meetings using two reporting templates specifically developed for the council. After this, they produced a thorough evaluation of the pilot, detailing baseline studies of time savings and surveys across practitioners.

Outcomes and benefits

Practitioners trialling the software quickly noticed a dramatic improvement.

Following a 63% reduction in admin time, social workers reported a significant change in their ability to submit and sign off on assessments earlier, allowing for better time management and productivity.

One social worker noted, “Magic Notes has been able to get the best out of me as an employee and allows me to be more productive.”

Moving forward, Swindon Borough Council plans to explore rolling out this type of tool across the adult social care service and identifying potential applications in other departments such as children’s services, and leadership support.

View original case study article at thinkdigitalpartners.com