This thought leadership article is written by Morten Mathiesen, Sekoia Chief Marketing Officer, Ambassador and Founding Patron of Championing Social Care.
Originally, I thought that I’d be the next digital Jamie Oliver. Before Sekoia took off, I was working with the same founder team to elevate school meals by creating a digital platform for cafeterias here in Denmark. We wanted to embrace and better the experience for everyone involved. Giving parents transparency and more influence, and subsequently inspiring food teams, and ultimately securing healthy and nutritious meals for the children.
During that adventure I got to experience more of the public sector services in general – care homes and services for example. When I started learning more, I started asking more contextual questions here and there, and it was evident from the first touchpoints that change, and innovation were much in demand. It was certainly needed!
One of the first people I spoke to was a union representative of social care professionals. Her first words to us have stuck ever since. As we originally thought Sekoia would be solving other issues in this space, she pointed us to a sincere and elaborate issue for her and her peers. She said that from the moment I come on a shift my entire day is one long line of interruptions, which really sowed the seed of the Sekoia tree we then planted.
As founders we agreed that this problem was one that we wanted to fix. We wanted care teams to gain overview and feel far better equipped. We wanted to eradicate the feeling of exhaustion and insufficiency that a lot of people felt going to work. Which has been our guiding star ever since.
The need to dig into her issue, and understand it better, of course kept growing. We saw that the care plans are basically dead. They had been stored, forgotten and at the very best worked as a thinly worn anchor for the entire support process. Felt by both professionals and the individuals in their care.
As a care management systems organisation in today’s working environment, you need to be a guiding star. You need to be able to answer why you’re here, entirely disconnected from your KPIs and business goals. For us, this has been it. We just say “enabling care” and it follows us through our on-boarding and support to decision-making in our product team and in our general customer advocacy.
At Sekoia, we provide a care management system flexible enough for any care service. With the latest industry standard templates to choose from.
Championing Social Care is an extended umbrella for us in that sense. It’s a realm of events and people that share a vision and a platform to shine a light on the incredible value of the social care sector to all of society. We are a volunteer-led group from across the social care sector focusing on delivering just and positive stories about a sector we all care so passionately for.
