Harrogate NHS improves efficiency and supports patient care services with SMART’s eRostering

June 30, 2011 - PRLog -- SMART, a leading supplier of workforce management solutions to the NHS has been selected by Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust for its eRostering solution. The Trust is using the eRostering solution to manage rosters for over 1600 staff.

Implementation began on the medical & surgical wards and was rolled out over the following twelve months to all wards. The implementation then continued to other areas including maternity, out-patients, theatres, A & E, as well as administration and clerical staff, porters, domestics and catering.

The system has also enabled the Trust to support the delivery of patient care services with the right numbers of skilled staff on duty that meet clinical requirements.

According to Simon Round, Workforce Systems Manager at Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust; “SMART’s eRostering matched our needs exactly. It gives us easy visibility to the rostering information and one place for all our data. We have rolled it out across the Trust so that managers are now able to make sure that we always have the right skill mixes working on shifts at the right times.”

He added, “We have been able to demonstrate the benefits and ease of use of the system to managers during pre-rollout consultation, implementation and post rollout implementation of the payroll interface. We have also been able to support the delivery of our patient care, ensuring we have the right staff working at the right time. SMART’s eRostering also enables us to model our requirements in advance to ensure that we have the right people on roster. This will be particularly useful for planning for the events such as the annual Great Yorkshire Show which place greater demand on our services.”

Using an electronic system has significantly reduced the time spent by managers to prepare shift patterns, particularly departments with complex roster patterns.
The Trust has linked the system to employee staff records (ESR). Details on shifts worked, leave taken and sickness are now recorded electronically, reducing payroll processing. The web based reporting tool allows the workforce team to drill down into the data for analysis of skill mixes, rosters and annual leave. Identifying patterns helps to identify if there are any long term sickness issues or absence patterns.

The Trust is planning to roll out the system to a further 1400 staff from the community-based health services, such as Community Nurses and Health Visitors, that  transferred to Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust  in April 2011.

Tristan Spencer, Health Market Director at SMART said; “E-rostering offers a quicker and more equitable alternative to prepare staff rosters. The potential savings are significant with the NHS quoting figures of an average saving of £3.4million per NHS provider in Yorkshire and the Humber. Many Trusts that have successfully deployed SMART’s eRostering have seen improved deployment of staff and reduced the number of agency staff. They have also reported better staff morale from staff being able to make particular shift requests that meet their personal or family needs.”

ENDS

NOTES TO EDITORS
About Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust
The Trust cares for a population of approximately 200,000 in the Harrogate and Rural District and North East Leeds by providing essential hospital and community health services.

Foundation trust status mean we have 15,400 Members of the community who are involved in running the hospital and ensuring we maintain excellent standards and are constantly improving our services for our patients and visitors. The Trust has approximately 3600 staff, including medical and dental staff, nurses and estates and administration staff.

For more information please visit: www.hdft.nhs.uk

About SMART
UK based and with 25 years experience, SMART is the leading provider of solutions for workforce management designed to help organisations to achieve agility and cost efficiency from their greatest asset – their people.  Utilising our own highly skilled and experienced people SMART helps companies to maximise the performance, productivity and value of their workforce.  Our solutions can assist in achieving a sustainable reduction in people costs of up to 10%, while providing a better working environment for staff.

From time and attendance through to workforce planning, scheduling, absence management and comprehensive automated reporting, the SMART solution suite offers a wide breadth and depth of functionality.  It can be fully installed on site, delivered as a managed or hosted service with a full range of support services from SMART’s own in-house consultants.  

Accessible from anywhere in the world, SMART’s web-based workforce management solutions are developed using Microsoft .NET to give a zero-footprint solution that is flexible, reliable, scalable and easy to implement, and provides an environmentally responsible option.  The data centre supports the Trees for Business Campaign and are collaborating with Brunel University to identify practical ways to recycle heat and airflow to minimise draw on the power supply, and uses optimised hardware to ensure power consumption is reduced wherever possible.


SMART in Healthcare
SMART RPC provides a simple web based solution for creating and managing Trust-wide staff rosters and time and attendance related activity.  The only Next Generation workforce management solution available today, SMART RPC has been designed by our developers to support all NHS Trust roles – a feature that is currently unique.  As well as eRostering SMART RPC encompasses Automatic Attendance Recording and Bank Administration, in one easy to use system.

As a Next Generation rostering application, SMART RPC has a host of time-saving features including Auto Roster which generates staff rosters in minutes, and alerts to managers in real time to warn of potential problems with their rosters.  In addition it provides unrivalled fairness and transparency in dealing with shift preferences of staff, helping to improve staff morale and reducing staff turnover.

SMART provides comprehensive workforce management solutions to a significant proportion of the UK Healthcare market and was selected as sole provider of e-rostering and time and attendance for the National ESR programme and has unique, proven and fully automated integration with ESR.

Over 600 organisations worldwide benefit from SMART’s solutions and services in both the private and public sectors.  Customers include Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust, Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, The Dudley Group of Hospitals NHS Trust, Ocado, Gist, Habitat, Jaguar, JCB, Mandarin Oriental, Sainsbury's, Swissport, Trailfinders, Tussauds Group, and Greater Manchester Fire & Rescue Service.

For more information, please visit www.smart-workforce.com.  

For information relating specifically to the NHS sector, please visit: www.smart-rostering.co.uk

For press enquiries, please contact:

Paski Matarazzo, Marketing Manager, SMART
Telephone: 01438 822229                
Email: paskim@smart-workforce.com             

Andreina West, PR Artistry
Telephone: 01491 639500
Email: andreina@pra-ltd.co.uk