Thursday 1 September 2011

Hospitals can get SMART, enabling NHS Trusts to minimise risk and maximise patient safety


Evidence-based decision making powered by Real Time Hospital from SMART set to revolutionise NHS approach to balancing staff skill mixes and patient safety while managing costs

SMART, a leading supplier of innovative workforce management solutions to the NHS, has today announced the availability of Real Time Hospital. This real time decision support system enables safe patient care and safe deployment of staff, reducing costs and patient safety incidents.

Real Time Hospital has been designed to provide up to the minute information to ward managers, matrons and executive management to support evidence based decision making. Real time information provides details of potential issues with staffing levels, skills mix, nurse/patient acuity ratios, permanent/agency staff ratios and unplanned absence. This enables managers to take immediate corrective action, so maintaining patient safety, minimising risk, and helping Trusts to meet the QIPP agenda. SMART’s Real Time Hospital is the first solution that looks at all of these areas in a holistic way to provide a single view to support managers in decision making.

Besides supporting real time staffing decisions, which are proven to save money and reduce patient safety incidents, Real Time Hospital also lets Trusts analyse variables historically. The solution enables Trusts to analyse the set of circumstances that lead to the need for corrective action and assist future planning to avoid such situations re-occurring.

Real Time Hospital provides Trust with:
• A consistent approach to measuring patient dependency/acuity levels
• A consistent measurement of outcome/nurse sensitive indicators
• A consistent method of relating staff skills mix number to dependency/acuity
• Real time alerts enabling real time hospital management through risk management and staff redeployment
• Records of inputs and outputs and actual staffing levels enabling more effective planning by adjusting establishment levels

Benefits to Trusts utilising Real Time Hospital are:
• Improved patient care though real time view of safety risk indicators
• Reduced patient safety incidents related to understaffing/skill mix/use of temporary staffing
• Reduced costs by redeploying staff and avoiding patient complications through correct staffing levels
• Reduced risks by increasing or redeploying staff based on acuity/dependency levels
• Continuous improvement by monitoring outcomes
• Compliance against trust targets and initiatives like QIPP
• Gives a single conduit to collect, collate and correlate data saving clinical resources

Nick Whiteley, who is the Managing Director Health Market at SMART said; “Providing quality care for patients is top priority for all NHS Trusts, however, management are often in the position of taking decisions that impact patient care with very little supporting information. Real Time Hospital has been designed to directly address this issue, by supplying detailed information to support decision making via a web dashboard that can be deployed anywhere.”

SMART Real Time Hospital is available as a standalone installation, or integrated with SMART eRostering, Bank and Time & Attendance.

FACTILE:
UK based and with 25 years experience, SMART is the leading provider of solutions for workforce management designed to help organisations to achieve agility and cost efficiency from their greatest asset – their people. Utilising our own highly skilled and experienced people SMART helps companies to maximise the performance, productivity and value of their workforce. Our solutions can assist in achieving a sustainable reduction in people costs of up to 10%, while providing a better working environment for staff.

From time and attendance through to workforce planning, scheduling, absence management and comprehensive automated reporting, the SMART solution suite offers a wide breadth and depth of functionality. It can be fully installed on site, delivered as a managed or hosted service with a full range of support services from SMART’s own in-house consultants.

Accessible from anywhere in the world, SMART’s web-based workforce management solutions are developed using Microsoft .NET to give a zero-footprint solution that is flexible, reliable, scalable and easy to implement, and provides an environmentally responsible option. The data centre supports the Trees for Business Campaign and we are collaborating with Brunel University to identify practical ways to recycle heat and airflow to minimise draw on the power supply, and uses optimised hardware to ensure power consumption is reduced wherever possible.

SMART in Healthcare
SMART RPC provides a simple web-based solution for creating and managing Trust-wide staff rosters and time and attendance related activity. The only Next Generation workforce management solution available today, SMART RPC has been designed by our developers to support all NHS Trust roles – a feature that is currently unique. As well as eRostering SMART RPC encompasses Automatic Attendance Recording and Bank Administration, in one easy to use system.

As a Next Generation rostering application, SMART RPC has a host of time-saving features including Auto Roster which generates staff rosters in minutes, and alerts to managers in real time to warn of potential problems with their rosters. In addition it provides unrivalled fairness and transparency in dealing with shift preferences of staff, helping to improve staff morale and reducing staff turnover.

SMART provides comprehensive workforce management solutions to a significant proportion of the UK Healthcare market and was selected as sole provider of e-rostering and time and attendance for the National ESR programme and has unique, proven and fully automated integration with ESR.

Over 600 organisations worldwide benefit from SMART’s solutions and services in both the private and public sectors. Customers include Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust, Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust, Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, The Dudley Group of Hospitals NHS Trust, Ocado, Gist, Habitat, Jaguar, JCB, Mandarin Oriental, Sainsbury's, Swissport, Trailfinders, Tussauds Group, and Greater Manchester Fire & Rescue Service.

For information please visit: www.smart-rostering.co.uk

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