Please note: The following feature is available as part of Birdie’s Core, Advanced, Plus, Care Management and Advanced Care Management packages (As well as Care Management & Rostering, Care Management, Rostering & Finance, Premium) Please get in touch if interested in more information on this feature!
Birdie enables you to create Essential Tasks, these tasks will need to be completed during the visit and will raise an alert if you do not receive an outcome. This ensures that your Carers are delivering the best possible care and that the Clients are receiving critical tasks during the visit.
How to add or update an essential task
Adding an essential task is the same process as adding a non-essential task. Select the Client, click on Task Planner and search for the task you want.
Here, you will be able to add notes and select the frequency and timing of the task. You can now also select if the task is essential by clicking the Mark as essential box.
The task will now have an essential tag on the Task planner page
And on the visit planning page. This ensures that you will be able to easily identify which tasks need to be added to a visit card.
If you have an existing task that you would like to make essential you can do this by going to the Task planner page, selecting the task and clicking Edit. Here you can select that the task is essential, click Save changes when you are done.
Please note: If you need to update the notes of the task with new instructions or change the frequency of the task schedule we suggest that you end the task schedule and start a new one. This is so that you can retain the original task instructions that are captured against visits that have happened in the past for auditing purposes. You will also not be able to edit the name of the task, you should end the schedule and start a new one.
Essential task alerts and the inbox
You will now receive alerts if the essential task was not completed during the visit. This will show as an Essential task not done alert which will be triggered before the visit’s scheduled end time.
If you see the task has not been completed or is overdue, you can click the alert for further details. Here you will see the reason it was not completed and any accompanying notes.
If you are receiving too many Essential task not done alerts, you may want to review your Care Recipient's task schedules and consider the following:
Is there a clinical or safeguarding risk if that task is not completed? If not then consider changing the task to a non-essential task
Do your staff need to be notified and provide timely intervention if that task has not been completed? if not then consider changing the task to a non-essential task
If you need to make a task non-essential, you can do this by going to the Task Planner tab for your Care Recipient, finding the task and clicking Edit.
Here you can de-select whether the task is essential, and click Save changes when you are done.
You will be able to gather further information about these tasks in your weekly 'Care Management trends' report via Birdie analytics, which will give you a breakdown of the most common alert types you get each week.
You can easily audit all Care Tasks monthly using Birdie Analytics. You can read more information on how to do this here- How to audit Care Tasks on Birdie Analytics article.
What do essential tasks look like on the app?
Tasks which are essential to carry out on the visit will have an essential tag on them, just like on the agency hub. The task will be marked as Done when it has been completed, however, care professionals will now have to state why a task was not completed.
Please note: Care professionals are not required to provide an outcome for essential tasks that are scheduled to occur at anytime rather than a selected time.
Care professionals can choose from a preset list of options such as Refused, Not observed, Not enough time, Not recorded or choose other, they can then write more details in the free text notes box.
A care professional can revert an incomplete outcome if they manage to complete the task during the visit by clicking back on the task and selecting Done.
If a care professional attempts to log out of the visit without completing an essential task then the app will flag a message warning them that some activities have not yet been completed. The care professional will need to go back and view activities to mark the essential task as complete or incomplete.
Birdie academy video