How one care home cut agency spend to zero and got their team back on the floor

Harbour Care Centre was facing a big challenge: absenteeism was spiralling

Wayne Price knew something had to change. As manager of Harbour Care Centre in Portishead – part of the Hudson Healthcare group – he was watching the same frustrating pattern play out week after week.

Staff calling in sick at the last minute. He was scrambling to find agency cover. The costs were creeping up, and there was no clear picture of what was actually going on.

The numbers told the story. The home’s average Bradford Factor score – a measure of how disruptive absenteeism is – sat at 188. Some staff members had scores over 1,000. (For context, anything above 50 typically triggers a formal conversation.)

Every absence triggered the same expensive chain reaction: call the agency, pay premium rates for unfamiliar staff, watch residents struggle with faces they didn’t recognise. 

The morale impact was real too.

Wayne’s permanent team felt it – constantly picking up extra shifts to cover gaps, burning out, starting to wonder why they bothered showing up reliably when others didn’t seem to face any consequences.

The old systems weren’t helping. Sickness records lived in paper files and spreadsheets that nobody had time to analyse. By the time anyone spotted a pattern, the damage was already done. Wayne knew there had to be a better way: he just needed the reporting and visibility to make it happen.

“We were stuck in a cycle. High absenteeism led to agency reliance, which ate our budget and made it harder to invest in our permanent team. Something had to give.”

What changed: visibility and accountability in the care home

Wayne brought in Syncurio, and started with something simple but powerful: making absence patterns visible. No more guessing. No more relying on gut feeling. Actual data, in one place, that told the real story.

The team added 12 months of historical sickness records into the system. For the first time, they could actually see the patterns – who was absent, how often, and crucially, what the impact looked like across the home. 

The Bradford Factor scoring brought it into sharp focus. This wasn’t about criticising people; it was about understanding what was happening and addressing it fairly.

Syncurio helps to make it fair and transparent

From here, Bradford Factor scores became visible to everyone. This meant that staff could see their own score when they clocked in, and they understood exactly what it meant and where the thresholds sat.

Wayne ran training sessions to explain how it worked. The message was clear: we’re all in this together, and now we can all see where we stand.

For staff with consistently high scores, Wayne worked with them individually. Some needed support. Some needed clearer expectations. A few, after no improvement, needed to move on.

A bit of healthy competition

Wayne introduced something else: group-wide visibility. Bradford scores across different homes in the Hudson Healthcare group were shared weekly. It sparked a bit of competition—no one wanted to be the worst performer. Teams started holding each other accountable.

The results: 

The turnaround was dramatic.

But the numbers only tell part of the story. 

• With consistent staffing, residents started seeing familiar faces every day – people who knew their names, their preferences, their routines. 

• Care quality improved because staff actually knew the residents they were looking after. They could spot when something was off because they’d built real relationships.
  
• Team morale lifted too. People wanted to pick up extra shifts rather than dreading them. There was a sense of fairness that hadn’t existed before.
  
• The admin burden dropped significantly. No more hours spent chasing agency bookings or manually reconciling timesheets. No more late-night phone calls trying to fill tomorrow’s gaps.

“Syncurio transformed how we manage our team. We’ve built a culture of responsibility, and our care quality shows it.”
— Wayne Price, Manager, Harbour Care Centre

What this means for operators

Wayne’s situation isn’t unusual.

Most care home managers know absenteeism is a problem – they just can’t see it clearly enough to do anything meaningful about it. The data is buried in spreadsheets and paper files. Conversations feel subjective. And without visibility, nothing changes.

When you can’t see patterns, you can’t address them. When staff don’t understand how their attendance affects the team and the residents, behaviour doesn’t change. When you’re stuck in firefighting mode- booking agency cover at the last minute, apologising to families, stretching your permanent team thin – the real work suffers.

With our care home financial reporting, Syncurio gives you visibility. Not data for data’s sake, but the kind of clear insight that lets you have honest conversations, support the staff who need it, hold everyone to the same standard, and build a team that actually shows up.

The result? Less time on admin. Less money on agency. More time doing what you got into care to do in the first place.