Effective workforce management is no longer just a priority for healthcare organisations—it’s an operational necessity. With tight budgets and the unrelenting demand for high-quality care, the ability to strategically manage temporary staff is crucial. Workforce solutions like RLDatix’s comprehensive platform can help optimise staffing processes, ensuring flexibility, control, and resilience across your organisation.
Achieving the perfect balance between cost, quality and control requires taking full advantage of the technology you have. This short guide provides you with 16 key steps to take to ensure you get the most out of your existing RLDatix workforce systems.
Best Practices in RLDatix Temporary Staffing Solutions
Efficiently roster your substantive staff with Optima
- Grade Costings: Within the grade contract, ensure cost elements are attached and updated annually, so you can generate bank costings within Optima. Additionally, make sure to apply specific pay scale points to individual staff, this will help generate more accurate costings and strengthen control over roster spending.
- Skills Management: Regularly review and update staff, duty and unit skill requirements. Use mandatory unit skills settings for temporary staffing to ensure only qualified staff fill shifts.
- ‘Send to Bank’ Options: Configure settings like ‘Required Grade Mandatory for Bank’ to ensure the right grades are assigned to shifts. Use fallback grades when necessary to enhance shift fill rates while maintaining flexibility.
Boost your internal bank with BankStaff
- Annual Leave Accrual: Enable visibility for workers to track and manage accrued leave, ensuring alignment with NHSE guidelines. This promotes fairness, flexibility and transparency.
- Agency Auto-Cascade: Automate shift postings to agencies. This reduces administrative time, supports a consistent lead time by agency and staff group and ensures equal opportunities for agency staff, while maintaining control over staffing processes.
- NHSE Reporting: Leverage tools within the system designed for seamless data submission, to meet monthly NHSE reporting requirements with minimal effort.
Enhance collaboration with CloudStaff
- Auto-Cascade Settings: Efficiently fill vacant shifts by enabling auto-cascade to your CloudStaff pool. Adjust lead times to give internal bank workers priority before reaching out to agency staff.
- Customised Unit Settings: Specify settings for each unit, to allow or prevent shifts being automatically cascaded to CloudStaff and customise lead times and resource pool preferences, allowing for tailoring per staff group.
- Rules and Governance: Enforce compliance by setting specific rules and guidelines for CloudStaff workers, including unit specific limitations around skills, grades and Working Time Directive rules.
Maximise agency usage with StaffDirect
- Cross-Functional Use: Deploy StaffDirect for all applicable staff groups, including Medics, Allied Health Professionals (AHPs), and Non-Medical Non-Clinical (NMNC) workers to achieve greater savings.
- Integrated Solutions: Integrate with BankStaff to create an end-to-end solution, reducing admin tasks, improving audit trails and ensuring up-to-date rosters.
- Direct Engagement (DE) Compliance: Ensure full compliance with DE models to maximise savings. Most RLDatix customers achieve a 95% compliance rate for eligible duties through this approach.
Engage and empower your workforce with Loop
- Utilise Groups Features: Utilise the groups feature to ensure temporary staff are always securely connected with individuals they are likely to collaborate with, with automation of members via posting, helping to enhance operational communication and worker engagement
- Redirect Notifications: Route Bankstaff or Optima notifications to Loop rather than relying on SMS. Notifications about bank bookings, cancellations, or other ad hoc matters can effectively be delivered through Loop, saving on SMS bundle costs while ensuring timely updates for staff.
- Enable Direct Booking through the App: Empower end-users to book shifts directly through the Loop app. This eliminates manual bookings by managers, saving valuable time for Bank Teams. It also improves the user experience for staff, allowing them to book shifts easily and securely from their devices and ultimately improving fill rates
- Add Unit Preferences: Allow users to specify their unit preferences through Loop. Employees can indicate where they would prefer to work and where they’d rather not, with these details feeding directly into platforms like Optima. This streamlines the list of available duties, making it quicker and easier for staff to view and select relevant shifts.
Discover the healthcare providers who have transformed their temporary staffing processes:
- Swansea University Health Board achieves control and visibility with BankStaff+ to deliver cost and efficiency benefits.
Read the full story
- Barts Health NHS Trust utilises StaffDirect to achieve agency compliance, leading to £20+million savings since 2014.
Read the full story
- North Central London Collaborative Bank identifies trends and optimises bank shift fill rates with CloudStaff.
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- Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust’s path to sustainable staffing solutions with Optima and BankStaff.
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Ready to learn more?
The RLDatix Flex solution supports you to optimise your temporary staffing processes by strengthening staff banks, creating a network of collaborative staff and getting the best value, when you do need to go to agency.
