Christchurch Care is a family-run, nurse-led domiciliary care provider based in Dorset. 12 years in, the team delivers over 2,000 hours of care a month to around 60 people, supported by 24 staff. Continuity of care and close relationships with people and their families sit at the centre of everything Christchurch Care does.

Before Birdie, Christchurch Care ran on a digital care management system that was increasingly unreliable. Visits would be knocked off the roster without warning, and the system gave no alert when a carer hadn't arrived for a visit. This meant that a missed visit often wasn't picked up until a family called the next day to say nobody had shown up.

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Software updates could also lock the whole team out without warning, sometimes for a full day, and getting answers from support could take up to a week.

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"It just wasn't a very reliable system," says Kelly Whitfield, Registered Manager at Christchurch Care. "It was just a huge safeguarding concern."

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Christchurch Care moved onto Birdie, including Upgraded Rostering, in early 2026, after comparing it against a handful of other providers.

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Birdie's Upgraded Rostering was launched in 2026 in order to remove a problem that most homecare software had presented for years: having to choose between a roster you don't have to rebuild every week, or one properly connected to the care record.

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Upgraded Rostering does both. Firstly, the visit pattern lives on the same record as the care plan, medications, funding and compliance evidence, so nothing needs re-keying or rebuilding by hand. Secondly, the system is built on a smart templating engine, so the roster can be built once and trusted to repeat.

The biggest shift has been in how long it takes to build and manage the roster. Rostering now takes up to two-thirds less time each week, even accounting for annual leave and last-minute cover.

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That's down to Birdie's rostering templates. Rather than building the week's roster from scratch, Kelly sets the pattern of who visits whom and when just once, even alternating patterns across multiple weeks, and the roster rolls forward from that automatically. A one-off change, a swapped carer, a rescheduled visit, doesn't touch the underlying template, so next week's roster still comes out exactly as planned.

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"Having the templates is an absolute game changer," says Kelly. "You can just set them and they're done forever. That to me has just made life really, really easy."

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Kelly's putting that time to different use now. "It's made a huge difference," says Kelly. "I've got that time now. I can sit and concentrate on the compliance side, and I'm spending more time with the team and going out to see them on visits, which I never thought I'd have time to do before."

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The rostering templates have also strengthened continuity of care, one of the things Christchurch Care is proudest of. Kelly can see at a glance when the same carer is visiting the same person week after week, building the kind of trust and familiarity that matters most to the people they support and their families.

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Missed visits, once a source of real anxiety for the team, have stopped happening altogether. "Now there's no missed visits. That risk has completely been eliminated," Kelly says. Real-time visibility means the team can see at a glance if someone's running behind or if a visit is sitting unallocated at the top of the roster, rather than finding out the next day from a worried family member.

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Since moving to Birdie, Christchurch Care has also seen 97% of visits start within their scheduled time, with the built-in travel time feature giving carers the reassurance that they're not rushing between visits.

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That same rostering data now feeds straight into Christchurch Care's compliance reporting. The on-time visit percentage Kelly tracks each week feeds her Q-Score, Birdie's unique tool that provides a monthly rating of care quality performance in line with the CQC. It gives her evidence she can bring to her monthly compliance meeting and show a CQC inspector at a moment's notice. "I always like to think I'm CQC ready anyway," she says, "but I love the graphs. It's really nice to have a visual instead of just paper."

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Support made a real difference too. "The support team at Birdie have been amazing," says Kelly. "We just ask a question, you get back straight away."

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The wider care team had adapted quickly to Birdie once they saw the day-to-day benefits, from shared tasks that tick off automatically to updating a care plan from the road the moment something changes.

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With the templates in place and time freed up, Kelly is focused on growing the business with confidence. When asked what she'd tell another provider stuck with a system like that, Kelly doesn't hesitate: "Just bite the bullet, just be brave, and just do it. From our experience, it's been really good... you might regret it if you don't."