The Snapshot 📷
Click on the links below to go straight to the story:
- Monthly Insights from a Medical Director
- Our latest product updates
- Upcoming Webinar | How job planning can improve safety, drive productivity and enhance wellbeing
- Download | Quick tips for medics job planning
- Introducing the RLDatix Annual Job Planning Review
- On-demand Webinar | Crafting effective and balanced doctor schedules
- Tip of the month from Customer Success
- New Customer Story: Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Trust
- Podcast | From Planning to Action: Transforming Healthcare with Data and Humanity
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Monthly Insights from a Medical Director
Dr. Darren Kilroy, Medical Director, RLDatix
Job planning for doctors has been with us now for quite a while, and its reputation has often gone before it in terms of how readily it’s engaged with and the challenges it can present. Even as you read that sentence, I can feel some people’s pulses start to quicken! That’s historically been a symptom of the way in which it has been approached and maybe even a misunderstanding of what it is there to do.
“Things are changing significantly as we speak for job planning, and I believe these changes are for the better. Right now, there is a campaign across NHS England to both improve the ‘sign off’ rates for completed and agreed job plans – it struggles to reach 60% as a national average – and to use the data in job plans to understand more clearly why the demand on our health services is not being adequately met by the clinical capacity – people – we have in place. At RLDatix we are closely involved at a national and regional level with this programme.“
For NHS Trusts employing job-planned doctors, this is a great opportunity for them to work with their clinicians and managers to ensure that job plan ‘sign-off’ compliance improves swiftly. Not because of the need to just hit a number, but because having a high percentage of agreed plans helps employers to fully reconcile what they believe to be happening amongst their workforce with what is documented as actually happening. That has implications for performance and for finance. For doctors, it matters because only through effective job planning can their hard work be properly captured and remunerated. For patients it matters most of all – because job planning is now being seen, finally, as a way in which we can influence access to care and, ultimately, find ways to speed up clinic and operating theatre waiting times.
Our latest product updates
We’re excited to introduce the latest updates to our workforce solutions: JobPlan 1.14, Optima 11.4.4 andBankStaff. Designed with medics in mind, these updates improve performance, enhance functionality, and streamline staffing processes—helping you plan, fill shifts, and maintain safe staffing levels more efficiently.
⬇️ Click the links below to view our product release articles.
Upcoming Webinar: How job planning can improve safety, drive productivity and enhance wellbeing
📅 Tuesday, 11th March 2025 | 2pm-3pm GMT | Location: Zoom
Download | Quick tips for medics job planning
Quick Tips
Maximise the efficiency of your job planning with our JobPlan Quick Tips document. Stay informed with notification alerts, track the Sign Off Timeline, and easily add objectives and required resources. Use the General Information section to update key employment details and attach supporting documents. Customise your job plans with flexible scheduling options, including Timetabled, Annualised, Hot Activity, Flexible, and On-Call structures. Share these tips with your team to help them get the most out of their job plans.
Need more support?
Introducing the RLDatix Annual Job Planning Review
Do you need some support with your job planning?
Our job planning experts are on hand to enhance your team’s capabilities, supporting you to identify areas for improvement and offer best practice solutions. Our Annual Job Planning Review ensures your job plans in the JobPlan system are accurate and aligned with your rosters, helping to facilitate 100% compliance.
We can help to:
- Enhance board assurance
- Improve workforce alignment
- Measure tracking performance
- Optimise resource allocation
Sometimes, you just need an extra pair of expert hands – Find out more about the Annual Job Planning Review here
Speak to a member of the team for more information:
Webinar | On-Demand
Crafting effective and balanced doctor schedules: best practices for medical staffing teams
Dr Jonathan Fenwick | Paediatric Speciality Trainee Registrar, Health Education England (North West), North West Single Lead Employer (Mersey & West Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust)
Watch this insightful session designed to inspire and educate medical staffing teams on best practices for creating doctor schedules that are both effective and considerate. We explored proven strategies to avoid common pitfalls that lead to unbalanced or stressful rosters, ensuring that schedules meet the needs of both healthcare providers and patients.
By focusing on thoughtful planning and collaboration, we aim to help you build rotas that enhance job satisfaction, reduce burnout and improve overall team performance.
Click the link below to access the session on-demand
Tip of the Month 💭
from Customer Success
Each month we will be sharing a top-tip from our team to help you to deliver exceptional care. This month we’d like to share with you a few words of wisdom, alongside an interesting article we think you might be valuable to you.
“If you want to drive both job planning compliance and quality, its key to have a well-defined objective and engage with different personas involved in job planning.“
Have you seen this NHS England paper on productivity and the ongoing work to support productivity improvement? The report features the 95% job plan sign off targets.
“A consultant job planning project has been launched, led by the national medical director for secondary care and all 7 regional medical directors. National and regional improvement support is currently being established to support and skill up local clinical and operational leaders, in addition to the national guidance and toolkits already published. The objectives of the work are to:
- Achieve 95% job plans signed-off at Board level by April every year
- Improve quality and levels of Attainment for medical consultant e-job planning
- Improve consistency of job plans to align with service demand with reduced variation and increased fairness
- Fully deliver approved job plans and only incur premium costs when core capacity is fully utilised.”
We have spoken with over 80 organisations so far this month regarding medics rostering, job planning and rota. We are here to help and keen to speak to as many as possible.
Please reach out to your Customer Support Manager to arrange a call or email [email protected].
New Customer Story
Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Trust: Transforming AHP workforce planning: a journey towards better patient outcomes and improved staffing levels with JobPlan.
Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Trust embarked on a journey to implement job planning for Allied Health Professionals (AHPs) across the organisation. An initiative driven by the need to improve workforce management, ensure safer staffing levels, and enhance patient outcomes.
Find out how the Trust introduced JobPlan across multiple AHP groups, addressing challenges, assessing benefits and positioning itself for long-term success.
Podcast | From Planning to Action
Transforming Healthcare with Data and Humanity
In our latest episodes of The Connection podcast, we explore two critical aspects of modern healthcare: operational planning and data-driven decision-making. Join Darren Kilroy and Liz Jones as they dissect the NHS Operational Planning Guidance, and listen to Andy Cowper and Will Browne share insights on making healthcare data truly actionable from the RLDatix Connected Health and Care Summit.
Key learnings: NHS Operational Planning
- Small changes, big impact: Incremental improvements in processes like job planning can collectively deliver significant efficiency gains toward challenging 4% productivity targets.
- Technology as a growth tool: Rather than viewing workforce technology solely as a cost control mechanism, use it to enable more efficient care delivery and secure additional funding.
- Community care integration: Better technology integration could help address fragmentation in community healthcare services, and in their conversation, Darren and Liz explored whether family carers could play a more formal role in care planning.
Key learnings: Turning Data into Action
- Focus on meaningful metrics: Avoid drowning in data by concentrating on fewer, more impactful measures that drive behaviour change and improve outcomes.
- Simplify technology: Streamline complex systems to allow clinicians to focus on patient care rather than administrative hurdles.
- Build collaborative cultures: Foster environments where data scientists work seamlessly with clinicians, and where teams value humility, curiosity, and joy.
At RLDatix, we’re committed to bringing people and technology together to create safer, more effective healthcare systems. We hope these insights inspire your organisation’s approach to planning and data utilisation.
🎧 Listen to both episodes now on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube
