Supporting Trusts and healthcare professionals to deliver better patient care through continuous innovation

The NHSP Viewpoint

 

As a leading provider of temporary staffing solutions to the NHS, NHS Professionals (NHSP) has seen a rapid market transformation over the past year. Most importantly, it’s reinforced the critical role of innovative technology to deliver services within the NHS to better effect, more efficiently, and with patient outcomes at its heart.

Amid a fast-evolving healthcare landscape, NHSP’s strategy, underpinned by retention, diversification, and innovation, is focused on creating sustainable staffing solutions that will grow the NHS workforce in alignment with the Government’s 10-year health plan.

In this article, we take a look at how innovation is driving new and more efficient workforce services in order to:

  • deliver workforce stability, flexibility and diversity that helps to protect patient care
  • support efficiencies and productivity with workforce solutions that can maintain high-quality patient care
  • provide workforce management systems, digital insights and streamlined compliance and onboarding to maintain high standards of patient care

 

Delivering workforce stability, flexibility and diversity that helps to protect patient care

By proactively creating initiatives, NHSP has been able to optimise resource allocation and also improve processes to increase productivity, with an increase in Bank fill rates by 12% and overall utilisation of approximately 80%.

In order to support the government’s plan to shift from acute to community settings, with earlier intervention, stronger prevention and more care at home, NHSP has also been exploring and entering into some of these new markets. This includes providing more support in the care environment and looking at how we will do that in the long term. In fact, we’ve already responded rapidly to this market shift by diversifying our service into previously untapped market areas, such as Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) and All Age Continuing Care (AACC).

Furthermore, our new strategic partnership with Patchwork Health means services like Doctors Direct can access live gaps in rotas directly from Trust systems. We can respond faster with suitable candidates, increasing first-time fill rates and reducing manual data entry and duplication.

It also allows for improved forecasting and deployment strategies, reducing a reliance on last-minute bookings and fostering a joined-up staffing approach with Trusts.

 

 

Workforce solutions that support efficiencies and productivity to maintain high-quality patient care

Within a fast-changing market, we’ve made it a priority to support better patient care through responsive, value-led workforce solutions, helping 140+ NHS Trusts and healthcare organisations deliver efficiencies and productivity. Furthermore, investment in technology, and utilising specific solutions and platforms, has enabled NHSP to enhance the customer experience for all stakeholders and meet specific staffing demands from our client Trusts.

The workforce solutions we deliver to our client Trusts and healthcare organisations are aimed at offering value for money that also deliver the assurance of NHS-level clinical governance standards. These solutions have achieved a significant impact in reducing core waiting times for queries and time spent on resolving cases for our customers.

 

Case study: Investment in technology partnerships to improve NHS capability

Our new strategic partnership with Patchwork Health, a technology provider with recruitment specialisms, is an important step forward to help improve NHSP’s capability to provide doctors and AHPs, as well as increase the number of healthcare professionals in these staff groups for the NHS.

The strategic partnership was trialled successfully with our client Trusts across the Hertfordshire and West Essex Integrated Care System, enhancing the online platform user experience for our Doctors Direct members. It also enabled us to strengthen and grow the NHSP Doctors Managed Service solution. This means Doctors Direct can now access and fill live gaps in rotas directly from Trust systems, enabling seamless data sharing, reduced duplication, and significant improvements in workforce planning efficiency.

This is an innovation which will help improve staffing efficiencies, drive up shift fill rates, and further reduce costs at a crucial time for the NHS. It also means that NHSP can scale our service effectively, sharing our expertise for managing large numbers of temporary workers and supporting on demand forecasts for Trusts – an approach that will continue to evolve in the future.

 

Providing workforce management systems, digital insights and streamlined compliance and onboarding

As part of our comprehensive programme of transformation, NHSP has taken a far-reaching approach, scrutinising the market for innovation and applying this to our own technology platform infrastructure. For example, we now provide smart shift management, along with the relevant digital skills and access, to enable upskilling and transform the future of caring for everyone.

As a priority, we’ve undertaken an extensive focus on data management, creating the foundations for better self-service and our ability to analyse and use NHSP data in ways that were not available previously. We’ve also continued to use data analysis to deliver our commitment to quality improvement and support client Trusts to develop their workforce strategies and temporary staffing deployment.

By utilising digital models, we’ve been able to create a cycle of clinical governance that is even more dynamic, and evidence led, providing real-time insight, automation and analytics that can enable early intervention and identify future risks more quickly. In addition, we’ve also been leaning into AI, utilising data to inform us of where customer needs are going to be greatest, for example, where the workforce reside and how far they will travel. As a result, we can better target our future communications.

 

How innovation delivers better patient care

NHSP will continue to place innovative technology and diversification at the forefront of service delivery, so that we can provide flexible roles and healthcare career opportunities that not only put patients first, drive cost savings and champion the NHS, but also grow the NHS workforce.

As a result of keeping innovation high on the agenda at NHSP we: 

  • grew bank fill rates by 12% and reduced unfilled hours by 25%
  • reduced agency use by 5.5% on the previous year
  • improved both the candidate journey and the onboarding process to significantly reduce time and resource expenditures
  • were able to contribute over £3million in savings to the NHS from our Specialist Services (non-nursing) function