Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust were experiencing challenges around the visibility of their medical workforce, making it hard for the Trust to efficiently plan and schedule rosters.
Working collaboratively with RLDatix, the Trust chose to introduce MedicOnDuty, Allocate Activity Manager and Allocate Rota to their medics workforce.
Having just completed the implementation project, we spoke to Martin Deacon, eRostering Manager and Sarah Whitton, Project Manager for the Programme Management Office and Digital Delivery Team to find out a bit more about the challenges they were experiencing, their goals for the project and plans for the future.
What challenges you were experiencing ahead of kicking off this project?
There were a couple of key issues we were experiencing:
- There was a lack of visibility of the medical workforce, which meant we had no assurances around staffing levels required to support patient and staff needs, as well as organisational needs to deliver services.
- A lack of meaningful data meant we couldn’t effectively plan our substantive workforce, leading to a high dependency on Locum and agency workers to cover vacancies.
- The medical rota/roster creation process was time-intensive, complicated and was prone to errors, leading to a lack of consistency in planning and scheduling rosters, including annual leave and flexible working requests.
- There was also a lack of visibility of leave requests and entitlements across the entire organisation.
What goals are you hoping to achieve?
There are a number of key objectives that introducing MedicOnDuty, Allocate Activity Manager and Allocate Rota is going to support us with:
- Top of the list is to get a fully transparent view of our medical workforce. To achieve this, we need to ensure that all leave, sickness and swaps were captured in real-time in the Allocate Optima system.
- Streamlining processes across functions was really important. Integrations between the Allocate Optima rostering system and payroll and ESR is going to remove all paper-based processes, reducing administrative burden, speeding up sharing of information and reducing potential errors.
- We needed to provide managers greater visibility of data and reporting capabilities, so they could make more informed decisions around their workforce requirements.
- Supporting staff health and wellbeing is really important to us. The systems are going to improve experiences for our medics workforce, by providing 24/7 remote access to rosters and improving opportunities for flexible working.
- The same as all NHS organisations, reducing agency spend is a top priority for us. We want to reduce bank and agency spend across the organisation by 5%-20%, through more effective and efficient digital rostering. The upcoming implementation of BankStaff+ is really going to help drive this as well.
- Improving productivity is top of the agenda at the moment, we want to reach Level 3 of the NHS Levels of Attainment for our rostering, which will see our teams analysing capacity and demand and using the systems to make evidence-based decisions, making it easier to report on productivity and deployment metrics.
How was your experience during implementation?
“Having led both the Agenda for Change rollout from 2021 and now Medics in 2024, I felt that the RLDatix approach to managing the project with the Trust leads had developed in a positive way and we experienced quick responses and support from the Programme and Project Managers when problems were identified.” – Martin Deacon, eRostering Manager
“We requested on site workshops and implementation activity which was readily agreed to and felt this was really positive and aided communication and development of working relationships over several months. Overall, it has been a positive experience and we do feel equipped now to continue the rollout.” – Martin Deacon, eRostering Manager
“RLDatix has been very responsive to our needs, from taking forward weekly project actions, to responding to questions on emails and helping us come up with solutions to problems.” – Sarah Whitton, Project Manager
We look forward to following Harrogate and District’s journey as they fully get to grips with MedicOnDuty, Allocate ActivityManager and Allocate Rota. Keep an eye out for updates on their progress soon.
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