Customer Story
How SMS helped Estia Health reduce admin and improve shift coverage
Overview
Challenge: Estia Health needed a quicker, more effective way to communicate vacant shifts to staff, as older methods like posters and phone calls were inconsistent, costly and time consuming.
Solution: Sinch Engage, integrated through Humanforce, enabled Estia Health to send and receive SMS within its workforce management system for shift bidding, staff communication and notification alerts.
Results: Faster filling of unplanned roster gaps, less admin time spent calling staff, better continuity of care and agency costs reduced by as much as 20% in facilities using the service.
“A great application for SMS is to fill unplanned leave in rosters. Before SMS we would have put up posters advertising available shift times or had staff members making phone calls. However, posters are really hit and miss and phone calls are costly and time consuming.“
In aged care, a vacant shift is not just a scheduling problem. It can affect staff workload, response times and continuity of care for residents. That is why Estia Health needed a faster, more dependable way to communicate urgent roster gaps to its workforce.
Estia Health is one of Australia’s largest residential aged care providers and uses Humanforce, previously known as TimeTarget, as part of its workforce management and rostering setup. Before SMS was introduced, unplanned leave was often managed through posters advertising shift times or by staff making phone calls — both of which were inconsistent, costly and time consuming.
To solve that, Estia used Sinch Engage (formerly MessageMedia) through Humanforce’s integration. That allowed staff to send and receive SMS from within the rostering system, making it easier to notify people about vacant shifts and support shift bidding based on best-fit candidates.
Faster shift filling, less admin pressure
For Estia, the most valuable use case was filling unplanned leave in rosters. SMS gave teams a faster way to reach available staff than posters or phone trees, while also reducing the amount of time administrators spent trying to cover shifts manually. Estia also expanded its use of Sinch Engage beyond shift filling to staff communication and notification alerts, such as meeting times and flu vaccination information.
The operational impact was meaningful. Jeremy Cassidy estimated that agency costs had fallen by as much as 20% at Estia facilities using the service, while shifts were being filled more efficiently. Estia also found that staff preferred receiving texts about vacant shifts, and administrators saw an important knock-on benefit: better continuity of care for vulnerable residents.
