Customer Spotlight: Workforce management and patient acuity at North Devon Hospice
We spoke to North Devon Hospice to understand how HealthRoster and SafeCare is supporting their 155 paid staff and over 400 volunteers.
Currently used by the inpatient unit and community teams, HealthRoster is helping to provide transparency on who, when and where their staff and volunteers are working. Such visibility has been crucial for the Hospice which provides specialist care and support to the community of North Devon who are impacted by a life limiting illness. Having a workforce who is well rostered will ensure that patients and service users get the care and support they need, exactly when they need it. In addition to the rostering benefits, moving to HealthRoster has encouraged greater accuracy and efficiency with payroll processes, through the timesheet extract functionality.
In 2020, the Hospice also introduced SafeCare into the 7 bed inpatient unit which is staffed by a team of community palliative care clinical nurse specialists, a hospice to home service and a supportive care service. Through designing their own levels of care descriptors and multipliers, incorporating Outcome Assessment and Complexity Collaborative (OACC) outcome measures, the team are able to track patient acuity and manage staffing levels to ensure safe care. These measurements help to inform the decision making process around the admission of new patients.
The next phase of the implementation is to roll out SafeCare to the community teams, add all staff including the retail team to HealthRoster for time and attendance management, and gradually phase in the rostering of volunteers.
We’ll be following the learnings and results of the implementation with the team at North Devon Hospice and look forward to sharing the successes with you all at a later date.
