AI Slashes Admin Time in Half for Ealing Council

At Ealing Council, social workers were spending over one-quarter of their week on admin and paperwork. It’s time that everyone at the council agrees could be better spent meeting more residents in need.

To address it, the council began a pilot of Magic Notes: a tool built by the artificial intelligence (AI) welfare services company Beam.

Magic Notes allows social workers to generate high-quality, detailed assessments in seconds, liberating frontline staff from admin time and allowing them to focus their efforts more on the conversation.

During the pilot, social workers and occupational therapists from Ealing’s Reablement team tested Magic Notes across 150 frontline meetings.

The results were a resounding success: Admin time was reduced by 48%, leaving practitioners spending less time on paperwork and more time on the most meaningful work.

Not only that, but every practitioner who used the tool agreed that their write-ups had become more accurate and evidence-based, thanks to the detailed notes that Magic Notes is able to produce.

Verona Maltman, head of service, bridging and reablement and hospital teams , says: “Magic Notes was an immediate hit with frontline practitioners, who consistently increased their usage through the trial period. This kind of generative AI is a real game changer for social care, saving significant administration time as well as supporting high quality work. The simplicity of this product means all social workers and occupational therapists should be able to feel this benefit shortly after receiving their training.”

Now, Magic Notes has been rolled out to more than 100 social workers across Ealing’s adult care teams, and a pilot is beginning in the children’s team.

Stuart Outterside, interim assistant director for adult social care operations at the council, says: “There’s a huge opportunity for the council to leverage AI to deliver a faster, more effective service, more cost-efficiently to the taxpayer. The rollout of Magic Notes has demonstrated the enormous impact AI can have. Practitioners love not just the time savings, but the way it allows them to really focus on supporting residents, and not on note-taking or form-filling.”

Joanna James, a social worker at Ealing Council, says: “All of us got into this line of work because we want to support people. What Magic Notes has done is let us really focus on that part of the job: cutting down the time I spend doing paperwork to give me more time with people. It’s hard to imagine my job without it, now.”

Magic Notes is the only AI assessment solution designed by care experts. In use at more than 70 local authorities, Magic Notes is saving hundreds of social workers thousands of hours a week on admin, freeing them from their desks and giving them more face-to-face time with the people they’re supporting. Data is stored safely within the United Kingdom, with strict adherence to the General Data Protection Regulation and local compliance policies.

— Source: THINK Digital Partners