Five NHS trusts roll out Allocate’s eCommunity to help free up staff time

Five NHS trusts have rolled out Allocate’s eCommunity tool to help free up staff time and allow them to spend more time with patients.

The employee rostering and workforce planning tool for community healthcare providers has been adopted by North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Trust, Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust, Black Country Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust and James Paget University Hospitals NHS Trust.

Allocate – which was recently acquired by RLDatix – designed the tool to help staff within community health and care services to deal with time and admin pressures. By improving caseload management, the trusts’ staff are able to deliver high quality care to patients, in turn improving the wellbeing of staff.

Kate Conway, project manager, North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Trust, said:  “Implementing eCommunity will identify and document precisely the amount of activity undertaken by staff, including travel time, to reduce overworking and increase efficiency of our service for patients.

“It will cut through administration and planning complexities to ensure that staff are deployed in the most efficient and effective manner so that the right people with the right skills are delivering the right care at the right time in patients’ homes.”

She continued: “In terms of workforce planning, eCommunity will help predict skills gaps and identify pressure points in service delivery and dynamically reallocate staff based on patient need. It’s a win-win for the Trust: reduced admin, reduced agency and additional hours spend, better care for customer and happier carers due to a more balanced workload.”

The technology will help care staff to prioritise their workloads and free up time that can be spent delivering care to patients in need.

Nick Wilson, CEO of Allocate, added: “In 2019, the QNI report found that 22% of community clinicians were working more than a day a week over their contracted hours and 30% had a caseload of more than 400 patients.

“eCommunity helps teams ensure workloads are shared fairly and assigned visit schedules are achievable within contracted hours taking into account patient facing, travel and admin time and we’re looking forward to helping these five NHS Trusts.”