e-Rostering: what‘s the new BAU?

COVID-19 has pushed us all hard to find solutions and be creative – in record time - but the virus looks like it’ll be a factor for a goodly while, so how can we capitalise on lessons learned and make best use of any relative lull to make further service improvements?

·        Certainly, empathising and engaging with staff is in sharp focus. We need to preserve precious skill sets, increase retention and support staff to perform to their best.

·        We also need to search for new ways to improve workforce effectiveness: disrupting weaker rosters, ensuring staff levels are optimised and rigorously controlling bank and agency spend.

Our view is that these are not incompatible aims. Moving to “the next level in e-rostering” will aid Trusts and Health Boards in meeting these goals, but what does this term really mean? Here’s our five point plan:

1.      Converge Data: The NHS is a complex system, it’s no longer enough to consider and analyse e-rostering data alone. Silos of data need to be converged, so that cause and effect is visible across systems. For example, what happens to care quality if annual leave is really high and a commensurate number of agency staff are on shift with little experience of a ward’s modus operandi?

2.      Predict and Model: A clean, rich set of data is crucial to developing practical machine learning models. Why is this important? Because machine learning can make transparent those staffing behaviours and opportunities that simply cannot be visualised by human analysis alone. For example, predicting staffing levels by day and shift to free staff to work elsewhere and predicting and disrupting short notice sickness absence.

3.      Guide and Support: Automated compliance management will guide wards to compliance, not just at roster sign off, but every day. It’s an AI-led pool of expert knowledge gently supporting wards to improve their planning. And, the use of natural language (rather than floods of data in Excels) and nudge theory increases action response rates.

4.      Automate and Personalise: “A la carte” reporting means tailoring metrics to optimise transformation and ensure ward performance and progress is transparent to the board. Reports that are time-consuming to build can be automated and intelligently distributed, saving thousands of expert hours.

5.      Foster Interoperability: As corollary to the above, a new information democracy springs from supporting Trusts to analyse their own raw data, returning control and analytics back to staff who know their NHS best, as well as driving third-party robotic processes (RPA) and feeding data warehouses.

There’s every reason to be positive as we reflect on the hard work, bravery and ingenuity we’ve seen from the NHS so far – and consider how we can define our expectations for workforce management for a new “business as usual”. Let’s crack on...

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