A council-run community alarm service has cut the time it takes to reach elderly and vulnerable people after being branded weak by inspectors.
The Social Care Response Service takes an average of 560 calls per week. Its mobile units react to alerts, such as users who have fallen or have suffered a serious problem.
In March it was severely criticised by the Care Inspectorate for sometimes taking than six times as long as it should to reach people. Inspectors saw data that showed more than half of responses to calls took longer than the target.
Staff complained of having low morale and blamed shortages for the failings. The council promised to take action and social work director Jennifer Tocher has now claimed success.
She said: “The length of time for a response had increased due to the increase in the number of calls to the service, and the increase in the complexity of need of the service users, resulting in an increase in the time spent with each service user who calls for assistance.
“Improving response times has been a main objective in the changes that have been made to the service.”
At the time of the Care Inspectorate’s visit, the team had five vacant posts which have now been filled. An additional seven sessional staff members, who are available to cover for annual leave and sickness absence, have also been recruited.
Ms Tocher’s report compares the service’s response times on two sample days before and after the changes in staffing.
On November 29 last year there were 81 calls received by the control room which then required a visit from the staff. In 12 cases it took over an hour to reach the person needing aid.
One August 18 this year there were 78 calls that staff needed to respond to, with the longest wait for any of them being 40 minutes.
Over the period average response times dropped from 31 minutes to 25 minutes. The service now has five vehicles available to deal with calls overnight and three during the day.
Ms Tocher said: “By implementing the actions detailed, there has been a significant improvement to the Social Care Response Service and this has been demonstrated by the improvements to the response times for users and a high level of satisfaction with the service.
“It is expected that this will result in an improvement to the Care Inspectorate grades at the time of the next inspection.”
A survey of 80 users saw 60% of them rate the service as excellent or very good, with less than 3% describing it as adequate or worse. A review of the service is being planned to see if any other improvements are needed.
Councillor Ken Lynn, convener of the social work and health committee, said he was pleased with the response to the Care Inspectorate’s findings.
“A survey has been carried out to gauge the views of service users and continuing focus groups will allow us to get further feedback,” he added.
“I want to ensure that their opinions can be used to help ensure further improvements. We can see from this report that waiting times are falling. I am keen to see this trend continuing.”