A carefully crafted bespoke solution to support nurses and healthcare workers who help us all in an hour of need.
For 445,000 people living in Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan, Cardiff and Vale University Health Board is crucial to their health and wellbeing. As well as overseeing seventeen health centres, public health and community care services, it also has a range of specialist services used by the whole of Wales.
Nursing staff are the backbone of these facilities — meaning the health board needs a way of ensuring that they are efficiently deployed to support the general public in their time of need.
To ensure this happened, we worked with the health board to develop a new bank shift system for nurses and external agencies. This would then allow them to view and inquire about available additional shifts, simplifying allocation and resources for all.
For a challenge like this, we needed to think out of the box.
A project like this needed a bespoke integration, which could draw data from an internal system called RosterPro, to allow nurses and healthcare workers to view shifts which would have otherwise been information for internal purposes only.
The next step was ensuring that the interface was user-friendly across mobile and desktop so that nurses and agencies had a quick and easy method of checking in. For additional ease, we also built multiple filters so nurses and agencies could define the hospitals that they wanted to view available shifts in, amongst other options. Furthermore, the temporary staffing department has the ability to set up agency user accounts, within the portal’s content management system (CMS), so that external agencies can offer to supply larger numbers of staff as required.
The result of working in this way was a much higher volume of nurse’s applying for vacant shifts, a significant reduction on the department’s resources and a substantial cost saving to the NHS by using NHS nurses over agency workers.
After creating the portal, we saw the following results:
These show not only the need for this system but also the fact that it was user-friendly and adapted across the health board so quickly, making the lives of nurses and agencies much easier.
WebBox worked with us to design a system that integrated with our existing software and worked effectively across a range of phones and other devices. This enabled a successful two-way feed of information between staff and the Nurse Bank office. The system is efficient and easy to use, enabling our staff to find work 24/7 and cover their staffing needs.
Sean Murphy, Financial Systems Manager, Cardiff & Vale UHB
