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NHS Staffing Efficiency

With Andrew Lansley determined to reduce the health service budget, NHS Managers face a difficult time. A high proportion of Trust budgets are spent on staffing, and this becomes an obvious target for accountancy-led downsizing. Let's be creative - the solution is not all about culling staff, but about helping them to work more efficiently.

The real trick is to maintain high levels of patient care, whilst ensuring that any optimisation potential is exploited rigorously in the short term.

Now more than ever, NHS Managers need to be in touch with the "numbers" and able to evidence a tight operation. This can be a challenge; wards exhibit a variety of legitimately different behaviours. So where to start ?

Oceansblue believe that the key to evidence-based staffing efficiency is to analyse the detailed data present in Trust's e-rostering, IMS and PMS systems. But whilst this data exists, its useful analysis and presentation has fallen way behind. Healthsense seeks to redress this balance; it presents complex staffing behaviours in a simple way - for instance on a touch plasma screen in the DN or FD's office. And rather than show the same tired tabular information, Healthsense graphically presents just the information you need - no more - using carefully selected telltale metrics.


Wards are probed from many angles, looking for innefficient and non-optimal behaviours, as well as presenting the fundamentals describing ward performance. The resulting information is (most importantly) costed, such that league tables of inneffeciency can be displayed. And if Trust policies are changed in an effort to reduce costs, Managers can be sure that these changes are being followed out on the wards, and that they do not produce unexpected, undesirable issues.

Trusts purchase e-rostering solutions to gain transparency on staffing behaviour, and to use this information to safely reduce costs. With Healthsense then, Managers can capitalise on their e-rostering solution, and use Healthsense to "make sense" of the data it contains.

With Healthsense you can see an updated view on your problem Wards without even clicking on "go". Overstaffing has a cost, as does a poor skills mix and a high sickness rate. Healthsense tracks over 25 metrics focussed on ward efficiency, with new angles for analysis added monthly. Regulatory institutions such as The Audit Commision and DoH are increasingly producing new metrics by which wards need to be assessed - Healthsense will include these as they emerge.

So in a nutshell, Healthsense measures, so you can manage.

quicklinks

Intelligence in Health

Best use of staff

e-rostering with SMART

The NHS is targeted to reduce costs by £20 Billion over the next 4 years. So we're all under the microscope...