As the demand for healthcare services has grown and the number of permanent staff has remained relatively static, temporary staffing has become increasingly common in the NHS. While temporary staff can help to ensure that patients receive the care they need, it can also be expensive and have implications for patient safety and staff morale.
Health systems, and their component organisations, have a universal desire to reduce the reliance on temporary staffing by improving workforce planning and investing in staff development and retention. But often the demands of day to day service delivery and the multifaceted nature of integrated working can make the process of understanding, analysing and opportunity spotting improvements in temporary staffing both complicated and difficult to resource.
Our support
Arden & GEM‘s team bring together a unique blend of expertise spanning project management, workforce planning, service redesign, data and analytics to provide a Workforce Efficiency Programme that helps health systems to reduce waste and improve value within temporary staffing. As part of the NHS family we also bring NHS internal expertise, experience and charge rates.
Our dedicated support delivers a tried and tested formula for reducing your organisations reliance on temporary staffing through the following 5 stages:
End to end NHS partnership support for reducing temporary staffing
Arden & GEM provides tailored support to help systems and individual healthcare providers reduce their reliance on temporary staff and therefore reduce agency costs.
Our reviews encompass agency staff, bank staff and locums and can analyse workforce at an organisation, pathway, service or system level.
Our support utilises four interconnected elements:
Governance, controls and reporting
- Provide a framework for providers to self-assess their governance arrangements, control mechanisms, reporting tools and procurement against good practice
- Facilitate this diagnostic, supporting organisational and system leads to identify key risks, issues and opportunities for improvement
- Partnering support to deliver improvement opportunities, helping leaders to produce plans for both bank and agency staff and advise on implementation
- Programme and change management support for provider and system level programmes, such as collaborative banks
- Insightful reporting on temporary staffing – integrated across financial, workforce and quality measures – to enable KPI monitoring at a local level and provide visibility on workforce strategy implementation.
Procurement advice
- Work with systems to ascertain the optimal route to market for all agency staffing based on need by reviewing framework offers, market dynamics and commercial models available in each staff group
- Lead the competitive selection and award processes required to secure the optimal mix of suppliers to meet staffing requirements and maximise value for money
- Work with systems at scale to secure greater savings from the aggregation of demand across wider geographies
- Develop medium to long term procurement strategies to reduce agency costs and review options to challenge and reduce demand.
Workforce organisation
- Support providers to implement and embed e-rostering and e-job planning to improve attainment levels, when measured against the national grading scale
- Work with teams to deliver the full benefits from procured digital systems.
Workforce planning and transformation
Supporting providers and systems with:
- Long-term strategic planning
- Workforce benchmarking and baselining
- Linking workforce and OD
- Service redesign and workforce changes to reflect new pathways
- System and provider level reporting
- Linking workforce planning with wider demand and capacity planning, as well as health and wellbeing, and EDI reporting
- Linking strategic workforce planning with financial planning to ensure services are delivered within the required financial envelopes.
The benefits
Working with our experts to reduce your reliance on temporary staff can deliver the following benefits:
- Cost savings: Temporary staff can be expensive, by reducing the need for this resource the NHS can save money that can be invested in other areas of healthcare.
- Improved continuity of care: By reducing the use of temporary staff, the NHS can ensure that patients receive more consistent care from staff who are familiar with their needs.
- Improved staff morale: Overreliance on temporary staff can damage the morale of permanent employees, who may feel undervalued or unsupported. Reducing this resourcing method can improve staff morale and create a more positive working environment.
- Improved quality of care: Increasing permanent staffing brings experience, expertise, familiarity, consistency and accountability that improves the quality of care.
- Improved patient safety: Temporary staff are often less familiar with the policies and procedures, which can increase the risk of errors or accidents.
- Better workforce planning: Providing a new focus on improving workforce planning and development can help to ensure that the right staff are available at the right time, to deliver efficiency and effectiveness in healthcare delivery.
CONTACT US
If you’d like to find out more about our Workforce Efficiency Programme please contact us here: