A happier workforce, productivity gains, cost savings and long term targets
Taking control of rotering and workforce planning with our demand and capacity insights
Author: Joe Aliferis 2023
Digital transformation Lead, Foundry Healthcare, Lewes
CTO, GPnetworks Ltd
Demand & capacity is a term that you see being increasingly used, in relation to Primary Care. NHS England has some helpful videos, articles and diagrams about demand and capacity but they are mainly focused on Secondary Care services and models. The focus is on ‘demand & capacity planning tools’ derived from statistical models. All good stuff.
At GPnetworks, we have developed a methodology for Primary Care that is based on the NHS England models but designed for the universal Primary Care reactive services:
- On the day service
- Two-week service
- Bookable / follow-up service
What is Tempo?
Tempo is a whole workforce, capacity management and rotering tool for GP practices, that plays a key part in the demand & capacity planning approach we have developed.
The Tempo interface makes it easy to use demand & capacity insights to plan, setup and rota your capacity, in an intelligent way, across a whole year.
Tempo takes the operational things that you already do, brings them together in one place, crunches the data and places everything into a live time-line. This instantly provides real-time capacity intelligence, at your finger tips. Then Tempo helps you do something beneficial with that.
Practices already do a form of demand & capacity management, Tempo just takes that to a level that allows a practice to realise some bug benefits. In this sense, Tempo allows practices to take back control and achieve an NHS England standard for Demand & capacity management. :-)
What is it?
Demand and capacity management for a practice or group of practices can be broken down into two key things:
Understanding your demand
NHS England has great ideas on how to do this using some fairly simple statistical models. Although these models were developed for Secondary Care, as a large practice with a keen interest in demand & capacity, we have developed a version of these models, specifically for Primary Care.
Designing and planning your use of capacity
This requires an understanding of demand for services and potential demand variation, coupled with an intelligent understanding of organisational capacity and capacity variation over time. We developed Tempo specifically to meet this need. Tempo allows practices to model and plan capacity weeks as intelligent rota templates, manage integrated leave in a dynamic way and handle any nuance of supervision, meetings or last minute swaps and changes, maximising the use of staff resources within the organisation and, crucially matching a known model of demand for services, as above.
Why do it?
The expression above also forms the basis of why to do demand & capacity management within a practice.
Right person, right session, right time is an expression of organisation productivity that also includes staff and patient well-being.
In plain English, if its possible to do a form of demand and capacity management its probably a good idea, because it can lead to:
- Higher patient satisfaction
- Higher staff satisfaction
- Lower costs
- Better recruitment
More
https://www.england.nhs.uk/ourwork/demand-and-capacity/why-demand-and-capacity-matters/
How to do it?
For us, at Foundry Healthcare, this has been the most interesting part and its formed the basis for 4 years of development of a solution, we call Tempo. But more about Tempo later.
A methodology for how demand and capacity management can be done, within a GP practice:
- Service targets
- Develop insights into demand and demand fluctuations over time by the best means at your disposal
- Continually evolve the quality of your insights into demand and check back against outcomes for validation
- Use best understanding of demand to develop service level targets for the organisation – in hours and/or in appointment counts
- Planning
- Create rota templates to express these targets as service design
- Create weekly / seasonal variations of these rota templates
- Manage all staff work plans in a dynamic way (over time periods)
- Manage staff time-off in a dynamic way (live calculations based on work plans)
- Create weekly work templates for staff to connect with work plans
- Create weekly/seasonal variations of staff week templates
- Create service teams by grouping staff
- Model team capacity over time periods
- Set team leave rules based on capacity models and targets
- Deployment
- Rota all staff by blending all of the above, striving for right person, right session, right time
Tempo
A digital solution to the operational challenges.
Built by collaboration between an operational team, a clinical team, a strategic team and a digital development team
How to do demand and capacity management can seem a little intimidating. You would not be alone, in thinking this. This approach to demand & capacity management within a practice is obviously difficult to achieve.
However, all practices do a form of demand and capacity management already. Recognising this and understanding the ways in which they do it has been key to developing a viable and effective enhanced solution.
For us, Tempo is that proven solution.
Practices are doing demand and capacity management
As we have worked with other practices, we have seen how all practices are trying to do a form of demand and capacity management and all are achieving a measure of it. However, being a large practice ourselves, we could see how hard this was to setup and maintain. The main problem is the added complexity of time. Its not too hard to develop a demand and capacity model as a one-off snapshot but to link the concepts to a dynamic timeline of change is almost impossible. At Foundry Healthcare, we had developed some very complex spreadsheets to try to do this and they fell short of what we needed.
In 2021, we started developing Tempo. Three years later, we were using Tempo to model and deploy our operations at Foundry, having transferred much of what we do into this integrated digital system. A key goal within Tempo is to rota right person, right session, right time.
Tempo crunches our day-to-day data, as we use it for standard operational management, creating for our management team:
- A live, dynamic capacity engine,
- A planning & costing tool
- A powerful rotering interface for deployment
- Continual operational insights
Joining our work together
Our strategic team uses the data naturally generated in Tempo by our operational team as part of a learning cycle that informs the next phase of planning.
Who else uses Tempo?
Tempo is now being used by a growing network of practices around the UK, as their core digital transformation toolkit. It helps to deliver better productivity, better staff satisfaction and better patient outcomes by delivering intelligent, integrated but simple to use demand and capacity management for their whole team.
In summary, Tempo can take what you do now and transform it into demand and capacity management, connect your management team and all your staff together, manage all time-off in real-time, rota all staff, semi-automate many time-consuming tasks and build a new powerful dataset for your organisation to use as part of its strategic planning and recruitment.
Get in touch with us
We value the opportunity to have conversations with practices about what problems they experience and how Tempo can help an organisation, as well as give working examples.
If you would like to know more or arrange a Teams meeting, please get in touch