Celebrating success is always important. Too often good work goes unnoticed. However equally important is the process of reflection, learning and sharing. This year’s Allocate Awards saw sixty-six organisations take time to reflect on their own work and to capture the specific activity they have taken to meet one or more of the principles of Workforce 2.0.
Workforce 2.0 provides a vision for effective workforce deployment. It was developed in conjunction with our customers and is designed to help organisations better describe the wider purpose of workforce deployment, including what effective deployment feels like to clinical staff and patients. Award entrants outlined how they had met one or more of the eight core principles:
Flexibility: Flexibility and agility is central to workforce deployment and to everyone’s benefit. It empowers both individuals and organisations creating a win win.
Care Needs First: The workforce is always planned and managed around patient and service needs; understood in real time.
Whole workforce: The focus is no longer on a single staff group; medics, nurses, AHPs, support services and others are managed with equal rigour and control.
Workforce Intelligence: Management information is central to workforce management and gives a 360-degree view of productivity and safety. This is known from front line to board and is acted upon.
Evolve Care Settings: Operational deployment of staff in community and social care is as advanced as any industry where staff visit homes.
Collaboration: The vision of workforce is extended outside of organisational and professional boundaries.
Technology: Workforce 2.0 is underpinned by technology that is easy to use and widely available – making everyone’s life and job easier. It enables workforce to be managed efficiently and effectively so that services are sustainable.
Leadership: Organisations have a vision of excellent workforce deployment and have strong leadership at every level driving continuous improvement.
25 organisations were shortlisted with seven winners and six highly-commended organisations; all judged by an independent panel of judges. As you’d expect all the shortlisted organisations were celebrated in style on the night.
However, for me the real impact starts now. That so many teams took time to reflect and capture their work, harnessing the lessons of their achievement is, in itself, a cause for celebration. That they have now created something tangible which can be shared with others to inspire, guide or even reassure, is even more impressive.
When it comes to sharing, our customers have an enviable tradition of openly supporting one another. Either side of the awards ceremony 158 health provider organisations gathered at our Annual User Conference with 40 of them sharing their experiences on everything from complex rostering of ODPs and nurse staff in theatres to setting up a shared collaborative bank across organisations or managing effective job plans that link to activity based rosters. This willingness to share, together with the breadth of experience of our customers, is why I am sure the extended impact of the awards, beyond individual teams and organisations, is one of the most significant advantages of the awards to our community.
I hope you enjoy reading the success stories here, thank you to all entrants and congratulations to those shortlisted and of course those that were winners or highly commended.
Liz is Allocate’s UK & Ireland Marketing Director, she has spent the past 15 years working within the healthcare technology sector. She led the programme to obtain NICE accreditation of Allocate’s SafeCare solution and is often heard presenting and chairing at healthcare events across the UK.
