Guy’s and St Thomas’s implement community workforce planning tool

Patients at Guy’s and St Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust will benefit from the introduction of new software designed to deliver safer, more coordinated community care.

Thanks to Allocate eCommunity, staff responsible for planning community healthcare visits will now have an accurate picture of both patient need and the workforce delivering care to help with the task.

Before the software implementation staff would spend up to two hours matching the right staff to the right patient and coordinating a spreadsheet for up to 40 new patient referrals daily.

With the new software in place, staff at Guy’s and St Thomas’ have saved a considerable amount of time by moving away from inefficient manual processes. In addition, care is safer as the right member of staff is seeing the right patient at the right time, and time saved can be spent caring for patients.

Using the app, staff can easily see their own schedule for the day ahead, which helps to plan their day according to the types and locations of visits.

Jo Perry, clinical triage lead at Guy’s and St Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust said: “Allocate eCommunity provides an up-to-date, accurate picture of the needs of our patients ensuring we can get patients the right care at the right time, reducing duplication and human error and ultimately making care safer for our patients.

“This software has provided us with a modern solution to the scheduling of patient care and rightly gives us more time to spend directly with patients, rather than managing an unwieldly, inefficient manual system.

“We are delighted with the improvements and efficiencies it has helped us make.”

Arti Fiaz, director, managing director, UKI at RLDatix, who completed its acquisition of Allocate Software in October 2021, added: “The skills of highly-trained clinical staff – who understand the complexities of patients’ needs, alongside the right technology supports hospitals and other healthcare settings to provider safer, more consistent care to patients.

“The benefits of this system are huge – patients get safer care with the right healthcare worker assigned first time. Clinical staff can focus on what they do best – treating patients and not battling with spreadsheets.”