East of England trusts, James Paget University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust have implemented a collaborative bank, allowing reservist staff to move between trusts, widening their sourcing of staff trained to administer the vaccine.
The collaborative bank, which is enabled through Allocate’s CloudStaff solution, provides the trusts with the ability to share self-registered, skilled staff across the region to fill vacant shifts on the rosters without the influx of staff onto ESR. It also reduces unsafe working practices by preventing European Working Time Directive (EWTD) rule-breaking and will supply trusts with control for shift cascades to ensure they meet their current service needs.
Positive staff experiences
Staff registered on the collaborative bank can book their shifts from an app, offering them the first sight of regional shifts before an agency release. This flexibility and accessibility over shift patterns have driven greater workforce satisfaction through a positive worker experience.
Nathan Bull, Digital Workforce Business Manager at James Paget University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said:
“The COVID19 vaccination programme workforce models for our two vaccination sites have been complex to put together; and have meant we needed to draw on a pool of skilled, registered staff bigger than our own internal Bank.
Demand for the vaccine has also been huge and to ensure we had a skilled and robust workforce in place to keep up with this demand, we needed to widen our options and the support of the N&W Reservists has been invaluable.
Using the CloudStaff platform to book, deploy and payroll Reservist Nurses, who are contracted outside our organisation, to our two vaccination sites has streamlined what could have been a complicated process.
To date, we have booked in excess of 700 hours through CloudStaff to support the COVID19 vaccination programme; ensuring our clinical teams have had the right numbers of vaccinators in the right place at the right time.”
