I’ve taken the time to reflect on the services we’ve delivered to our residents over the last six months; with a particular focus on ensuring our residents remained safe and secure within their homes throughout the pandemic.
Johnnie Johnson Housing manages nearly 2000 domestic gas heating systems and over 50 commercial gas heating systems as part of our an annual gas-servicing programme. We work in partnership with Sure Maintenance and Hayman Mechanical Services to ensure that the homes of residents living in our independent living schemes or general let properties are safe and compliant.
Our performance has remained strong, despite the impact and challenges that Covid-19 has presented us with, ensuring we complete 100% of our servicing. From the outset and as far back as February, we made decisions and put plans in place that would help us to maintain our solid performance, these included:
Introducing a system to alert contractors where we had residents who were self-isolating, we could therefore re-book appointments quickly and effectively with minimal disruption
Accelerating our gas servicing programme by three months
Reviewing our end to end processes and introducing enhanced COVID procedures
Developing new and enhancing our existing communications to residents to reflect current practice, ensuring our residents were made aware of changes quickly and that those messages were delivered in the right way, with the right message
Using data to drive the decisions we make, has further reduced the risk COVID posed to non-compliance. We reviewed our data to tailor our service around resident personas, for example knowing which of our residents would prefer evening or weekend appointments due to working commitments has proved real success and we will continue this approach into the future.
Sadly, every year in the UK, 4000 people attend A&E with suspected carbon monoxide poisoning caused by faulty boilers, gas fires or cookers, leading to an average of 50 fatalities annually. Our number one priority will always be our residents’ safety, we therefore took an approach that as long our contractors could carry out work in a safe manner with the correct safe systems of work in place, the servicing programme could continue.
In bringing our programme forward we have completed almost 1500 domestic gas heating system services within the last six months, that is almost 82% of our whole domestic programme. We’ve been able to manage this process as a result of having a fantastic, knowledgeable and experienced compliance team. Our Compliance Coordinator’s intensive management of our gas servicing contracts has cemented our strong performance. Using our daily reports data to make data driven decisions and monitor our compliance through our compliance management systems.
Six months on, we are now able to truly realise the impact of our forward planning and daily reviews of our performance measures. Taking action early has resulted in us:
Seeing an increase in first time access rates to 70%
Gaining access on third visits to 97% of homes
Only having 5% of properties that were completed within the month they were due
Having to rearrange only 22% of residents initial appointments this is a 10% increase in our performance on the previous year resulting in a reduction of failed appointments
Finally, I’d like to take the opportunity to thank our front line teams, especially when access proves more difficult. Despite the lockdown period and working remotely our colleagues across our Neighbourhoods Team continue to do a remarkable job in engaging our residents and stressing the importance of completing these critical safety visits – a truly #outstanding service delivery
We will continue to embrace and adapt our working practices with our #oneteam value! Whilst moving into the future to ensure that our residents are always safe and secure within their homes.