Running a safe and effective health and care system is crucially important and the NHS can look to digital systems to upgrade recruitment processes and alleviate the workforce crisis
The NHS today faces severe workforce challenges, including declining GP numbers, rising demand and a struggle to recruit and retain staff – all of which risks having a knock-on effect for patients. To start to bring these numbers up, and improve health outcomes across the UK, the healthcare sector is starting to harness the power of digital systems to streamline recruitment without losing vital system safeguards.
Digital systems have a key role to play in mitigating workforce challenges. Workforce management platforms (WMP) can support practice managers to effectively organise employee information, recruitment processes and rostering all in one place.
The benefits of workforce management platforms
Detailed data on staffing levels enables practices to employ intelligent planning and effectively deploy available resources to meet patient needs within each clinical area.
WMP can lead to reduced under and over-staffing and reduced reliance on temporary and agency staff.
Improved use of staff will result from clear visibility of contracted hours and staffing levels. This provides fairness and transparency across all services and activity.
The staffing situation changes daily and hourly; WMP offer much-needed flexibility, promoting the effective redeployment of staff across the organisation to maintain appropriate staffing levels.
WMP provide improved recording, transparency and management of planned and unplanned non-working time, eg annual and study leave.
They also provide detailed information about clinical staff, such as skill mix and leave and absence records.
Payment of paperless staff timesheets – including unsocial hours, bank, on-call, call out and locum payments – are easily made using data which is entered at source on e-rosters and then signed off for payment.
Finally, there is increased autonomy for staff as they are able to choose their duty and off duty and request leave via mobile devices.
The potential of such digital solutions can be further enhanced if all data is recorded and stored in an agreed standardised away.
Further developments
To further improve digital recruitment and retention strategies, the Professional Records Standards Body has been working with the NHS to develop a workforce standard that ensures all employment information can be contained in a single, national, digital staff ‘passport’. This passport would reduce the amount of duplicated form-filling and employment checks, as well as avoiding unnecessary repetition, and costly mandatory training, when staff move between employers.
The digital passport has the potential to include public health, primary care, social care and the independent sector and, in addition, encompass details on pay, benefits, pensions and performance.
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