Visiting Angels West Leicestershire has just been rated ‘Outstanding’ by the CQC in every category, on its first ever inspection. With only around 4% of adult social care services in England achieving an Outstanding rating overall, doing so across all five categories at once is even more rare, and a huge testament to the team. The franchise branch supports around 70 people with domiciliary care, including people with complex health and mobility needs, through a team of around 45 carers known as Angels. Jade Thumwood, Managing Director and Registered Manager, puts it down to a simple philosophy: caregivers who feel rewarded, recognised, and supported deliver better care, and happier clients follow.

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Domiciliary care providers typically get barely a day's notice that CQC is coming, and barely a day afterwards to hand over everything the inspector asks for. Whatever evidence a team can show has to already exist, current and ready to pull, not pieced together in a scramble. Jade knew that firsthand: at a previous, larger homecare franchise, she used another leading care management system, and she'd sat through a CQC inspection on paper, chasing documents and piecing evidence together after the fact.

Jade had already seen what Birdie could do. Other branches within her previous network were using it, and she'd long admired its "second to none" care plan system. So when she launched Visiting Angels West Leicestershire, she built the branch on Birdie from day one, with no paper backup.

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When CQC came to inspect, Jade felt no nervousness: Birdie is built to make everyday evidencing straightforward, not something scrambled together on the day. When a carer flags a concern, for example, the whole pathway is visible in Birdie: what action was taken, whether it connects to a wider pattern, and what changed as a result.

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On the day of the inspection, Jade walked the inspector through Birdie live: onboarding records, supervision history with automatic reminders as check-ins come due, and skills certificates, all attached to each carer's profile.

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For specific clients the inspector wanted to look at more closely at, the team had already built "client case studies" inside Birdie: short write-ups showing exactly how a piece of care met the outstanding standard.

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"It was great to sit down with an inspector and show them our onboarding pathway, right down to real-time supervision dates," Jade says.

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Day to day, the same systems power the branch. Birdie Analytics, including the Pulse Dashboards, gives the team a live view of concerns, overdue assessments, and upcoming reviews. The branch tracks its Q-Score, Birdie's monthly rating out of four that maps directly to CQC ratings from Inadequate to Outstanding, and consistently hits the top score. Carers get time-sensitive updates through Birdie's messaging tools instead of being contacted on days off, and families follow along through the Family App with each client's consent.

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Alongside this, Jade's team has been an early and enthusiastic user of SmartPlans, Birdie's AI-powered care assessment tool, which records a care consultation and suggests answers directly into a care plan in the person's own words.

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Inspection-ready in hours, not days

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With less than 24 hours to submit evidence after the inspector's visit, the team securely shared encrypted care plans, mental capacity assessments, and best interest decisions straight from Birdie. "Using Birdie makes evidencing compliance a thousand times easier," Jade says. "It used to be clunky. Now it's push-button ready."

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Faster, calmer responses to concerns

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Alert response times have improved from around two hours to consistently under one hour, more than 50% faster. "In home care, we have multiple concerns coming through daily," Jade says. "What matters is what action we take."

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Care plan writing time cut by more than two-thirds

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Before SmartPlans, writing up a care plan after a consultation typically took two to three hours. SmartPlans has cut that by around two hours per plan, and adoption has moved fast: 100% of new clients now have a SmartPlans-supported care plan, up from 60% a month earlier. The time saved has gone back into quality: monthly audits now finish several days early, and coordinators have more time to brief carers before they meet a new client.

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Standing up to scrutiny on AI

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Jade's trust in SmartPlans was tested directly when a complaint was raised to the CQC about the branch's use of AI in care planning. She explained exactly how SmartPlans works: recordings help build a person-centred care plan, are never shared with general AI tools, and are deleted after a set period, with clinical judgement always staying with the care team. The inspector found the concern unsubstantiated, and instead saw first-hand how person-centred the resulting care plans were. "We showed them it's the client's voice, and it's how they want to be heard," Jade says. "You can't get more person-centred than that."

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With the right foundation in place, Jade’s ambition now is to bring the same standard of care to more people as the branch grows. "We've always believed we provide outstanding care, but you've got to prove it," she says. "Being rated outstanding in all five areas is testament to having the systems and processes in place that let us focus on the caring." For a franchise built on putting carers first, that's not a one-off result. It's the standard the whole team now expects of itself, every single day.

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