How Cygnum supports the delivery of Shared Lives in South Wales

To begin with, the NHS’s description of Shared Lives: “Shared lives schemes support adults with learning disabilities, mental health problems or other needs that make it harder for them to live on their own. The schemes match someone who needs care with an approved carer. The carer shares their family and community life, and gives care and support to the person with care needs. Some people move in with their shared lives carer, while others are regular daytime visitors. Some combine daytime and overnight visits.” Caerphilly County Borough Council leads a Shared Lives partnership of eight, comprising six other local authorities and one health board.

All care offered on the scheme takes place in the carer’s home. It ranges from daytime care, which might mean a couple of hours during which the person with support needs visits the carer’s home, through to one arrangement in Caerphilly where the carer has been providing full time support for over 30 years. Shared Lives relies upon the commitment of ordinary people from within the community who are trained, assessed and approved by the scheme to provide care to those who need it.

“We support, monitor and train every carer,” explains Martin Thomas, Shared Lives Business manager at Caerphilly County Borough Council. “We then deal with referrals that are made to us and match people with appropriate carers.”

How Shared Lives operated before

Prior to going live with CACI’s Cygnum solution in 2024, Caerphilly’s Shared Lives scheme used a system that was designed for it at its inception in 2011. “It was a standalone, bespoke system,” says Martin. “It served us well over the years but there was no scope to develop it. It had been designed and built by a freelancer who had moved on. The system started to fail, which prompted us to look at other options.” The scheme needed new software that could handle the key components of tracking and managing carers, matching their availability and skills to people who need support and then paying the carers correctly for the placement.

Why Cygnum?

“We needed the flexibility of a system that could expand with us,” explains Martin. “For example, if new local authorities join us in the future, we need to be able to integrate them quickly. Cygnum offered that flexibility and I can alter so much in the system myself, such as fee levels, local authorities joining or leaving and the people who come and go from the scheme.

“It was important to me that we could become autonomous in our system usage and not reliant on outside help to set things up and function. With Cygnum, we can make the changes we need without assistance from the team at CACI.”

How the Shared Lives team got up and running with Cygnum

As part of onboarding, CACI provides project management, training, go-live and ongoing support with Cygnum. “The whole end-to-end process was good, from initial conversations through to the design and build that we needed” says Martin. “Samppa and the rest of the CACI team captured our needs really well in the full delivery of Cygnum. I had a very clear view in my mind of what I wanted and CACI captured that. We’re a bespoke service and the system suits our needs. It can be complicated, but it works and CACI adapted the system for us.”

One area that always causes concern when switching to a new system is change. Change management is a vital step in any project. Effective training is a central component of this. “The training, led by Odette, was excellent,” says Martin. “It was intense, but it made it easy for us to get started with Cygnum.

“This meant that we could manage the transition from the old system to Cygnum well. With each step, it enabled us to develop a strong working relationship with CACI, too.”

The final stage was to go live with Cygnum. “After testing and training, we were ready,” explains Martin. “Our in-house go-live saw our team of 32 start using Cygnum. I was a bit nervous because I was expecting some reluctance to it all, but everyone has taken to it better than I had hoped. We rolled out delivery so that some of us were using it first and getting things set up, but this meant we ended up rolling it out to a team who were immediately comfortable with Cygnum.”

The role of Cygnum in Caerphilly’s Shared Lives scheme

“Carers are set up on Cygnum and we can easily access what sort of care they can provide, for example if it’s respite, shorter term care, or long-term care where someone will move in with them,” explains Martin. “Similarly with referrals, we can get them into the system and understand their needs quickly. Our team can use the wallchart in Cygnum to see who can provide what and match them to the people who are referred to us. It makes it easy for us to add people, both carers and referrals, and understand their needs and availability. We can then understand the needs of the person being referred and the availability, skills and training of the carers in the system.”

Another support role that Cygnum performs is in calculating pay to be allocated to carers within the scheme. This varies by carer, depending on factors such as how long they have someone with them, be it for a few hours or more permanently, and the type of care required. Caerphilly can utilise Cygnum’s customisable rules engine to ensure that pay is accurate, on time and flexible to evolving requirements and methods of calculation.

“As part of a more gradual roll out, we will be increasing the functionality available to the team as we go,” continues Martin. “To start with, however, Cygnum has delivered the essentials that we need; managing caseloads, managing referrals and ensuring that carers are paid on time. To that end, Cygnum has delivered exactly what we needed and I’m excited to roll out more functionality as we go.”

What’s next for Cygnum and Shared Lives?

As Martin and the team expand upon the early success of their use of Cygnum, there’s positivity that it will deliver even more increased efficiency and time savings. “I’m excited to build upon our use of the system,” he says. “We will be able to use it for things such as DBS record checks, contacts database and reporting.

“We will be training the whole team on reports next. At the moment it’s a manual process whereby the team have to go to our administrators to access historical information which is relevant to the referrals and carers they are working with. If the administrators are busy, this slows the process down. Once we’re up and running with reporting in Cygnum, this will take them a couple of minutes and they can self-serve. This will improve our response time and increase efficiency.”

Conclusion

“Working with CACI has been a real pleasure,” concludes Martin. “The project ran as smoothly as I could’ve hoped and the communication from CACI was good throughout.

“I’m excited that Cygnum gives us the opportunity to deliver our Shared Lives services to our communities in the way we need.”

For more information on the Shared Lives scheme and how it supports people, please click here.

For more information on Cygnum, please click here.