Aberdeen hospital sets standard for NHS workforce management in Scotland

Published: 22-Nov-2012

The Royal Cornhill Hospital implements SMART e-Rostering and Real Time Hospital solutions


The Royal Cornhill Hospital in Aberdeen has gone live on all 19 wards with the SMART workforce management e-Rostering and Real Time Hospital solutions from Kronos.

The e-rostering system allows ward managers to build more efficient rosters for staff, and the Real Time Hospital patient/nurse acuity solution provides immediate information on staffing levels and skills mix, supporting more effective and efficient deployment of staff.

The rollout makes the hospital the first in the NHS Grampian area to benefit from the solutions and will help to form a template for deployment to the rest of the Health Board.

e-Rostering and Real Time Hospital are being used to determine the movement of staff, and to balance numbers and skills mix in wards between qualified and non-qualified staff. This means that decisions are made from a position of knowledge, enabling staff resources to be optimised to meet specific patient care requirements.

As a result ward managers are able to input information into the system in a short amount of time. This replaces previous paper-based systems that were far less efficient, releasing ward managers back to patient care and managing their teams.

Daily returns for each ward are now being replaced with electronic returns, saving significant amounts of time for ward managers, administration staff, and management.

Patient care is key, and when staff are not in the right place at the right time, Real Time Hospital enables us to get them there quicker

The Health Board is now starting to build a library of information to support trend analysis of staff/patient ratios on a daily basis. This will facilitate long-term analysis of establishment figures and organisational learning.

Neil Buchanan, efficiency and productivity programme manager at Grampian NHS: “The implementation of SMART e-Rostering and Real Time Hospital at the Royal Cornhill is going well and we are encouraged by the results we have seen so far. Patient care is key, and when staff are not in the right place at the right time, Real Time Hospital enables us to get them there quicker.”

Tristan Spencer, director of SMART at Kronos, added: “NHS Grampian is very much leading the way in Scotland. In a busy hospital environment, being able to respond quickly to patient demand is crucial. e-Rostering provides part of the solution to ensure staffing levels and skills mixes are balanced and efficient. Real Time Hospital, as the name suggests, provides the up-to-the-minute information to allow ward managers to respond effectively to day-to-day situations.”

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