St. Columba’s Hospice in Edinburgh, is a charity providing exceptional end-of-life care and support to people with life-limiting illnesses. Through their expert care and support St Columba’s ensures each patient’s unique needs are met. Beyond medical treatment, the hospice offers physical, emotional, and spiritual support, fostering dignity and comfort for patients and their families.
Through their state-of-the-art in-patient care, well-being services, counselling, bereavement services, and spiritual guidance, St. Columba’s Hospice is a beacon of compassion, ensuring patients and their loved ones receive the care and support they need.
How Vantage Software has helped St Columba’s Hospice
Speaking to St Columba’s Estates and Facilities Manager, Stuart Walker, we were keen to learn more about how Vantage software had improved efficiencies and processes at the hospice:
“Prior to Vantage, most of the recording was on paper forms and analysis was carried out using Excel. This was a very labour-intensive method which was slow and only as good as the person completing the form or analysing the results. We did have other applications for recording the helpdesk requests, but this was not easy to expand or change, so it showed signs of age.”
With Vantage “the issuing of helpdesk requests and the reporting of Incidents is more efficient through the ease of the web forms, and these are sent to the appropriate person as soon as they are completed. Incidents are completed more efficiently as we are not having to find or pass a paper copy around and as they are all saved within the database can be analysed easily.
We are now able to search, deal and analyse events and issues quickly and to a whole new level and if required cross link to a particular item on the asset module or a maintenance activity within the Planned Maintenance module etc.
The modules are both very user friendly and easy to amend and modify and can be readily changed onsite when required for example – room name changes in locations.”
Do you feel you get good support from the Vantage team, regarding implementing the software, training, and support?
“Since our first meeting, we have felt that Vantage wanted to help us and have always listened to our feedback. There is no question that is too difficult that they will not answer, and this is throughout the whole team.
I have attended a few of their User Group meetings and have found these to be both informative and friendly plus allowed me to network with other like-minded organisations.”
As a result of implementing Vantage Software have you identified any financial savings for your charity?
“That is a hard one to quantify as we start to build new modules when we have a requirement and have been doing this for the two years we have had the system. The answer is yes as I remember previously analysing risks and chasing people every month and that is now history as the system sends email triggers at 2:00 in the morning so they are in staff’s inboxes for the morning, so yes, we have more time!”
What do your staff and management think of Vantage Software?
“They have responded well to its ease of use and ability to grow with the organisation.”
What do you think are the main benefits Vantage software has brought to your organisation?
“An ability to store more information and manipulate it in an efficient manner to make us a safer and more efficient organisation. We have also benefited in cost as we purchased the “all module” package which means we can grow the number of modules at no additional cost to the organisation if they are presently available.”
