Final Year Project · C00262499
A proof-of-concept web-based scheduling platform designed to aid scheduling of personal assistants within the Irish healthcare industry.
Executive Summary
The disability support sector in Ireland faces a serious operational crisis. Non-profit organisations such as the Irish Wheelchair Association (IWA) and the Health Service Executive (HSE) rely on generic off-the-shelf software or a fully manual processes to schedule Personal Assistants (PAs) using tools that fall far short of what scheduling coordinators actually need.
This results is organisations using limited systems are failing to deliver an estimated 20% of services annually. Service users are people with physical and intellectual disabilities who depend on PAs for essential daily tasks like personal care, meal preparation, and getting to work or education, for them a missed service is not a minor inconvenience. It is a direct harm to their quality of life and independence.
This project proposes a low-cost, purpose-built web application that gives scheduling coordinators the tools they genuinely need: meaningful forward planning, clear visual dashboards, and recurring service support. Running costs are limited to a single web hosting fee , making it a realistic option for non-profit organisations operating under tight financial constraints.
The target outcome is to reduce the missed service rate from the current 20% down to a far more achievable 5–10% — a meaningful and measurable improvement in the lives of some of Ireland's most vulnerable people.
Business Requirements
Existing systems in place offer only a 4-week forward planning window — inadequate for managing employee leave and proactive rescheduling. The system delivers a 4-month planning horizon, shifting coordinators from reactive firefighting to proactive management.
Both scheduling coordinators and PAs need clear, role-specific dashboards. The manager dashboard provides a full tabular view of all services across all PAs. The PA dashboard presents a timetable for the current and upcoming work week — all service information visible and easy to read.
Many services are identical week after week, yet coordinators must re-enter each one manually. The system supports weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly recurrence, with the ability to edit a single instance without affecting the entire series.
Technical Solution
After evaluating three approaches — a standalone desktop application, commercial off-the-shelf software, and a web-based solution — the web-based approach was selected as the only one to comprehensively meet all business requirements at a cost appropriate for the sector.
A desktop application was ruled out due to the IT administration overhead of installation and maintenance across multiple devices, the need for a shared local network, and the requirement for an additional mobile application for frontline PA workers — all increasing cost and complexity beyond what these organisations can support.
Off-the-shelf software was ruled out for its surface-level features (4-week planning cap, limited recurrence), and the ongoing subscription, licensing, and implementation fees that are inaccessible to non-profit organisations with constrained IT budgets.
The web-based solution requires no installation, works on any internet-connected device, centralises data in a single database, and keeps costs to hosting fees alone. It was built using a straightforward three-tier architecture and directly implements all three business requirements.
Technology Stack
Analysis & Evaluation
| Criteria | Desktop Application | Off-the-Shelf (COTS) | Web-Based Solution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forward Planning | 3 | 1 | 4 |
| Visual Representation | 3 | 2 | 4 |
| Recurring Services | 3 | 1 | 4 |
| Service User Impact | 3 | 2 | 4 |
| Employee Fairness | 3 | 1 | 3 |
| Cost Accessibility | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| Environmental Impact | 2 | 2 | 3 |
| Total Score | 17 / 28 | 9 / 28 | 26 / 28 |
Scored 0–4: 0 = No support · 4 = Comprehensive support
Ethical Considerations
Service users in the disability support sector depend on PAs for essential daily activities — personal care, meal preparation, getting to work or college. A missed service causes real harm. Reducing the miss rate from 20% to 5–10% represents a meaningful improvement to the quality of life and independence of some of Ireland's most vulnerable people. The uncertainty of service delivery also causes psychological distress; a more reliable system reduces that anxiety directly.
Current systems force scheduling coordinators to plan reactively, grabbing the first available PA to cover a shift rather than distributing cover work fairly. The manager dashboard's full four-month visibility across all PA schedules directly enables fairer, more balanced shift assignment — reducing overloading and unpredictability for frontline workers.
Transitioning from manual paper-based scheduling to a fully digital system significantly reduces paper consumption across large organisations. The system runs on shared remote hosting infrastructure, requiring no dedicated local hardware — keeping its energy footprint minimal. Research confirms that digitising health records has a measurable positive environmental effect.
Choosing a low-cost web-based solution over a technically complex custom build is itself an ethical decision. A system that organisations cannot afford to adopt has no real-world benefit, no matter how feature-rich. Keeping costs to hosting fees alone ensures the system is accessible to the non-profit bodies it was designed for — where it can actually make a difference.
Live Demo
Explore the working proof-of-concept — including the manager and PA dashboards, recurring service management, and four-month planning view.
Launch Project