Allocate software rollout across 13,000 staff empowers teams, optimises patient care and resource use, and reduces temporary staff spend in one unit by nearly 90 percent
9th September 2019: The Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has announced its rollout of an e-Rostering platform from British software provider, Allocate, to enable highly accurate shift and budget planning across its sites.
The trust has implemented Allocate’s HealthRoster across 13,000 staff and is now adding the SafeCare module to match team capacity and skills to specific patient needs, enhancing patient care and safety while reducing overtime, agency and bank staff spend by almost 90% in some units.
Allocate’s e-Rostering platform provides the trust with a complete, consolidated picture of clinical staffing across its sites and specialties, including bank and agency staff. The system enables it to compare available skills and capacity with specific patient needs in a single view, highlighting exactly what resource is needed to staff a shift. Using data captured by e-Rostering, the Trust can align budget and team information with patient requirements, providing a joined-up approach to resource planning and enabling it to tailor shifts and budgets more effectively.
In one of the first units tested, the trust’s use of the Allocate system alongside SafeCare over a four month period has reduced temporary staffing usage from 110 to ten shifts in one roster period, and monthly overtime hours from 580 to 150, delivering an overall reduction in temporary staffing use of 89 percent.
Samantha Hunt, e-Rostering Systems Manager at the Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “We are a large trust dealing with extremely complex patient needs and so deploying e-Rostering has been transformative in our ability to effectively plan and make sure we have the right staff in the right place at the right time.
“Our technology use has supported and complemented the strong professional clinical leadership in this area to deliver significant improvement and staff and patients can now be completely confident in our ability to deliver great service and care.
“At the same time, we’ve reduced agency spend by ensuring that team members are deployed effectively, and temporary staff called on only when needed.”
Newcastle NHS Foundation Trust is one of the UK’s busiest and largest trusts, with over 1,800 beds, 14,000 staff, 1.84 million patients and an annual income of £1billion. The trust is the second largest provider of specialised services in the country and operates across seven main sites.
Allocate’s HealthRoster and SafeCare e-Rostering solution includes a real time, patient-led, staff monitoring tool that tracks patient acuity scores, allowing matrons to plot staff requirements on each ward by patient dependency, view how safe their wards are, and how the staff are meeting the needs of the patients. This data can be used to analyse precisely whether the workforce is sufficient and where additional staff should be deployed in real-time. The system enables joined-up management of multiple locations and multi-disciplinary teams for nursing and support staff across the Trust’s hospitals’ wards and specialty units.
The technology deployed so far is supporting the Trust’s progress against the Levels of Attainment set by NHSi. As the next stage in its rollout, the Trust will add Allocate’s RosterAnalyser and RosterPerform systems to its platform.
RosterAnalyser allows ward sisters to have more visibility and control over their planned rosters to ensure they are striving to reach the Trust KPI’s in relation to budget, headroom, safety, effectiveness and fairness. RosterPerform will allow the Trust to compare and report on key KPI’s across units, directorates and the trust as a whole and enforce the ‘Ward to Board’ engagement agenda.
Hugh Ashley, Managing Director at Allocate UK and Ireland, said: “By moving to e-Rostering, the trust has been able to further deliver on the NHS’s strategic priority of putting patient safety at its core. We’re delighted that the team is now planning to add further functionality to the platform and will work closely with them to ensure that they get the best possible outcomes from the system.”
Allocate’s HealthRoster is the UK’s most widely-used e-Rostering solution, used by over 60 per cent of NHS trusts to successfully deploy over a million staff, in more than 300 organisations nationwide.
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