Improving Kingston and Sutton Boroughs’ employee work-life balance with AppSheet

Snapshot: The London Borough of Sutton provides support to more than 2,700 adults in the borough, including with their Short Term Assessment and Reablement Team (SMART). Discover  how they used AppSheet from Google Workspace to:

• Design a custom no-code app to enable real-time access to critical data

• Reduce administrative tasks by 40%

• £2500 per week in savings

A third party application failure leads to a new and better solution

The London Borough of Sutton provides support to more than 2,700 adults in the borough. A key part of this service comes through our Short Term Assessment and Reablement Team (START), which provides up to six weeks of support to residents who've been referred by a social worker or health care provider.

Each of our team members has to manage a daily client visit schedule, information about each visit, and a process for booking in and out of a visit while in a resident’s home. The systems we previously used to support the START team were a complex network of legacy software platforms and applications, which were both unreliable and difficult to navigate.

When a third-party mobile application at the heart of that network failed, the START team had to revert to printed paper schedules. That meant 80 team members across two shifts visiting our office to pick up the printed schedules to understand which residents they needed to care for, the nature of the care to be provided, and where each resident lived. 

Because of this disruption, they started and ended their days later, and the information they had was static: if any updates needed to be made, the office had to call the individual worker. This wasn’t sustainable, and our People’s Directorate "Digital Programme Team" worked swiftly to identify and develop an in-house digital solution to replace the failed application. 

Developing a no-code appointment management app

We explored a few potential solutions, but they either were going to take too much work to deploy, or they were missing key features. Since we were already using Google Workspace, other Google products were pre-vetted for data security capabilities by our IT team. This allowed us to explore Google’s no-code app creation product, AppSheet, because it’s integrated with Google Workspace. We wanted to see if we could build our own tool to meet the specific needs of the START team. 

We already had a clear idea of what we needed from the app and had seen AppSheet in the Google Sheets menu but had never used it. It was so simple that we were able to get started in a matter of minutes. And with the app up and running so quickly, we were able to test, iterate, and launch the new appointment management app in just a few weeks.

Originally, the idea was to run the new app in tandem with the paper solution for several weeks, but the 80+ person care team immediately embraced the new solution and had fully adopted it by the end of the first week.

Reducing administrative burden across public services through digitization

With the new AppSheet application, we were able to transform the process and the back-office team was able to upload visit schedule information directly to the new platform. This allowed team members to start their shift without first needing to visit the office to pick up documents. Printing documentation was extremely time consuming and was causing additional costs. At the time, staff were spending 7.5% of their working week on admin tasks. Thanks to the AppSheet app, that was down to 4.5%, and we could use that time to become even more efficient. The changeover saved us more than £2500 per week. 

Since the app was created in-house, we were also able to iterate and tailor its functionality to meet the team’s needs. By placing the most relevant information front and center, and digitizing key scheduling and documentation, we provided the team with additional capacity to focus on resident-centered activities for improving care.

It also meant that team members could better respond to changing resident requirements as they had real-time access to critical data. That included information about how to access a resident’s property and specific care instructions which are valuable details that previously needed to be relayed by phone. Scheduling and administrative staff were also able to quickly verify if team members had booked in or out of visits and assess if visits were beginning and ending on time. With that level of detail, residents can be advised swiftly of any delays.

We have now implemented a new care management solution for our START team which replaces all of the legacy platforms and the AppSheet solution. However, since the AppSheet experience was so easy, we are considering other places where we can create apps to bridge existing processes and deliver service efficiencies. For example, we have a new internal induction training process and see an opportunity to have a welcome app for onboarding new social workers. We’re constantly looking for new digital opportunities and are looking forward to iterating our app usage to help better support all our colleagues with relevant useful data directly to their mobile phones.

Whether your team is in need of a new scheduling and tracking app or you’re looking to capture data, automate workflows, or connect your existing tech stack, AppSheet can help you and your organization create impactful solutions quickly. Learn how you can start building your own apps fast, no coding required. Get started now.