Hertfordshire NHS Trust extends rollout of e-rostering software to save costs

Savings of £750,000 over first three years lead to extended rollout

Hertfordshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust has rolled out business software provider Allocate's e-rostering software to 160 different areas of nursing within the Trust.

The extended rollout comes after the Trust managed to save £750,000 over a three-year period in an initial rollout to 54 nursing areas.

Phildah Chifamba, e-rostering project manager at the Trust, told Computing that the Trust's 3,000 nurses were previously using a paper-based system that was time consuming and inefficient.

She said that the Trust wanted a computerised system to monitor and optimise workflow in order to manage the nursing budget better.

"We had paper rosters that were done manually by every ward team. You had to be physically in the ward to see if there were any issues with staffing, for example," she said.

Chifamba said that although the Trust saw presentations from other vendors, it chose Allocate's HealthMonitor e-rostering software because it was the easiest to use.

She said that it was much more efficient than the paper-based system, especially as it could keep a record of requests.

"The e-rostering system allows users to see the pending requests and help managers to see which nurse has requested annual leave before another. When we were using paper rotas there was no audit trail," she said.

HealthRoster is an on-premise system built using Microsoft SQL. It manages more than 150 overlapping staff tasks at one time to ensure that the right numbers of staff are working, including staff of different levels and specialities.

The inital software implementation took place in October 2007 and took six weeks, according to an Allocate spokesperson.

"It's a big piece of kit. We had a team on site for six weeks plugging it in and making sure it was on the servers. They then built the database and worked with various people across the trust to input all of the individual requirements for the staff and their working patterns," she said.

The software was implemented in 54 different nursing areas and by May 2010 the Trust had saved £750,000, according to Chifamba.

"People were not actually meeting their contracted hours prior to the implementation. We took two months of our employees' paper rotas and put them onto the system to use as a reference. After using the electronic staff record (ESR) for our rotas and payroll, our financial director then calculated how much we managed to save from the loss of contracted hours we had previously," she said.

Chifamba said that another problem was that employees were being overpaid because of complex paper-based time sheets.

"For example, people who work a night shift on a Sunday would only get Sunday's rates for some of the hours but these were complicated to put down onto the time sheet. The e-rostering system automatically knows what the time sheet should look like," she said.

Chifamba and her deputy were trained by Allocate on a four-day course to use the system. She gives on-going training to staff at the Trust.

Chifamba said that because of its success, the Trust had now rolled out the software to 160 nursing areas.

It is being used across most in-patient areas to manage staff resources across its nursing, crisis, administrative and occupational therapist teams, and Chifamba expects to see further cost savings in the coming years.