Inclusion Saskatchewan, formerly the Saskatchewan Association for Community Living, works across the province so that people with intellectual disabilities are valued, supported and included in their communities. The main office is in Saskatoon, and the people it works with live across Saskatchewan, most of them in the Saskatoon and Regina areas.
The organization runs several programs at once: support and advocacy, employment and transition services, self-advocacy leadership training, a family network for parents and siblings, and systemic work carried out alongside government and community organizations. Separate teams handle separate parts of that, and all of them work from the same client files.
Inclusion Saskatchewan has used Sumac Case Management since February 2022. Brittany, a Program Manager, oversees case support and prepares the reporting that goes to the CEO. Mikayla McMechan, also a Program Manager, runs the programs side, including employment, self-advocacy, and the organization’s newer programs.
Intake
New clients arrive through a support request form. Inclusion Saskatchewan customized theirs well past the default, adding fields that record where each request stands, so the form is also their record of what has been handled and what has been passed on elsewhere. A submission emails the team. An intake call follows, the client is assigned to a consultant, and that consultant is notified through a Sumac reminder.
Case plans
Every case manager at Inclusion Saskatchewan works in case plans. Case notes and communication logs are in daily use, against a monthly deadline for having records current. Brittany uses Sumac’s case management dashlets for day-to-day oversight of her team.
Several teams share the same client files, so what each person can see matters. Mikayla assigned a Sumac role to every member of staff rather than leaving people to guess at their own settings.
Reporting
The organization reports each year on how many cases fall into each area of need. Both the case plans and the support request form carry that field, split into categories such as housing, physical health, mental health, education and residential supports. Mikayla also watches those numbers as a trend, because a rise in one category tells her programs team where to build supports next. A month with fifty intakes relating to education asks for a different response than a month with five.
Alongside that, the team uses Quick Count, the Outcome report, Days in Program, and Age of Active Cases.
Counting the case plans that were active during a reporting year had been awkward. A plan might have opened before the period and closed inside it, or opened inside it and stayed open, so a single number meant running several searches and cross-referencing the results by hand. On a call in June, Meaghan Watson from Sumac’s product team showed Brittany a search that returns both groups at once, on intake date within the period or exit date within the period, and pointed her to the Case Plans by Program and Status report, which Brittany had not used before. “That’s exactly what I’m looking for,” she said.
The CEO wants quarterly and annual trends rather than weekly snapshots, so Brittany exports the numbers out of Sumac and builds those charts in Excel.
Results
The quarterly case evaluation forms were the other piece of manual work. Each one was added to a contact record individually, one client at a time. “It’s a good solid four hours every quarter that I’m like, I will be doing this.”
Sumac’s support team showed her an import and export approach instead. The case plans are exported, then imported back as a new record type with the case manager and the date range already filled in, which takes most of that afternoon out of the job.
[QUOTE PLACEHOLDER — Brittany or Mikayla on the effect of getting those hours back / to be sourced and approved]
New releases have been landing well with their team, and Brittany and Mikayla have both spent time with Sumac’s product team this year, talking through what program managers and executive directors need to see from the system. Both have said they will keep doing it.
