As a lead employer, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust took the initiative of launching the roll-out of a collaborative bank across the South East London integrated care system (ICS) to support the delivery of the Covid-19 vaccination programme.
The collaborative bank, which was facilitated by Allocate’s CloudStaff software, was pre-planned and implemented at speed to enable the sharing of trained vaccinators across the ICS trusts. It also ensured staff were paid correctly and on time, and provided assurance that staff had the necessary skills required for the rosters.
Working closely with Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Foundation Trust, Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, the collaboration has saved time on removing the need for recruited vaccinators to have to be recruited again in order to work at another Trust.
However, the real success story comes from the collaboration between the ICS trusts which has enabled relationships to be built across different teams
North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Trust, Epsom & St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust, Black Country Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust and James Paget University Hospitals NHS Trust have all made the shift to eCommunity, signaling their commitment to further improve service user and staff experience through better time planning and less admin.
Richmond, London, 10th August 2021: Five UK NHS Trusts have all turned to Allocate’s eCommunity technology to improve their community care service as the need for community delivered care increases alongside a need to staff wellbeing. Allocate’s eCommunity platform is a field-based workforce planning tool designed to combat the time and administrative challenges faced by community health and care providers allowing Trusts to deliver high-quality care to patients and service users who need it, while at the same time improving staff wellbeing.
Trusts are increasingly looking to free up more time to care across their community workforces. Technology such as eCommunity can ensure that care staff are clearly prioritising workloads and releasing time to care with patients.
Kate Conway, project manager, North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Trust, commented: “We’re excited to roll out eCommunity across three different staff groups – Community Nursing, AHPs and Homecare Practitioners – each consisting of members from 8 Integrated Care Communities.”
She continued: “The planning capability of the tool will represent something of a cultural change at the Trust and bring multiple benefits. Firstly, being a rural Trust means resources are in lower supply than elsewhere in the country, so staff wellbeing is top of our list of priorities. Implementing eCommunity will identify and document precisely the amount of activity undertaken by staff, including travel time, to reduce overworking and increase the efficiency of our service for patients. It will cut through administration and planning complexities to ensure that staff are deployed in the most efficient and effective manner so that the right people with the right skills are delivering the right care at the right time in patients’ homes.
“Finally, in terms of workforce planning, eCommunity will help predict skills gaps and identify pressure points in service delivery and dynamically reallocate staff based on patient need. It’s a win-win for the Trust: reduced admin, reduced agency and additional hours spend, better care for the customer and happier carers due to a more balanced workload!”
“While traditional eRostering software works really well for us when scheduling staff for static sites, for community-based caring, we needed something more responsive and dynamic,” explained Laura Green, Senior Workforce Project Manager, James Paget University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. “We have 130 community-based staff, each with differing work schedules, caring for close to 6,000 patients in the area. Because eCommunity has compatible workflows with our existing rostering software, the communication will appear in real-time, so if a visit is extended, for example, or an emergency referral comes in, we will know exactly where that carer is.
“Releasing time to care for our nursing staff is a priority for James Paget, and the efficiency of the eCommunity system – such as scheduling appointments based on clinical needs and by postcode – means patients will get better care, faster, as carers spend less time dealing with administrative tasks. In addition, the improved productivity due to better logistical decisions will mean reduced travel times and costs for the Trust.”
Nick Wilson, CEO, Allocate, commented: “We are committed to doing all we can to help community delivered care – many of us have been touched by these services personally at some of the most significant times in our lives. We will do all we can to help those delivering care spend time fully focused on patients, rather than preparing schedules, navigating logistical challenges and working overtime to the point of burnout.
“In 2019, the QNI report found that 22% of community clinicians were working more than a day a week over their contracted hours and 30% had a caseload of more than 400 patients. eCommunity helps teams ensure workloads are shared fairly and assigned visit schedules are achievable within contracted hours taking into account patient-facing, travel and admin time and we’re looking forward to helping these five NHS Trusts.”
For more information about eCommunity, please visit the Allocate eCommunity page.
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Notes to editors
About Allocate Software*
Allocate Software is a leading international provider of Human Capital Management solutions, supporting the operational and administrative needs of health, care, defence and commercial sectors.
In the health and care sector, Allocate is enabling the delivery of safe and effective care at optimal cost, by helping organisations to have the right people in the right place at the right time. With over 800 clients and over two million staff rostered daily, Allocate serves the largest public and private sector institutions around the world. Allocate Software is headquartered in the United Kingdom, with nearly 700 employees, including over 200 in research, development, and product management functions. It provides services and support to its international customer base through regional offices in the UK, Sweden, Germany and Australia. For more information, visit www.allocatesoftware.com.
*Allocate Software was acquired by Chicago-based RLDatix on 28th June 2021. RLDatix is the international leader in governance, risk and compliance (GRC) solutions for healthcare.
