Saving the NHS £2m/year and increasing capacity with eRostering

The NHS Long Term Plan, which looks at the future of the health service, set out the need for the service to act as “one NHS” in adopting interventions which deliver proven benefits for patients and staff. As a provider of more than 400 NHS services and employing more than 7,000 predominantly NHS colleagues, Virgin Care took up the challenge in 2019 to begin implementing eRostering – electronic systems to manage staff hours and workload – across all of its services.

The challenge

Since 2018, NHS England has been focused on reducing reliance on agency staffing across the health service and instead looking towards the “bank” – colleagues employed on highly flexible contracts by NHS providers, who work flexibly as and when it suits both the worker and the employer – to fill the gap instead.

Paper-based rotas, fixed working hours regardless of demand on the service and patients’ preference for appointments, and a managers’ “black book” of phone numbers to call round for temporary ‘bank’ staff have served us well for many years, but increasingly technology can help us to support more flexible working – and cut down on the administrative time spent planning out rotas at the same time.