How things work
Capacity & segmentation of staff
This is a screen shot of the workforce management landing screen, in Tempo, showing the first ‘baked in‘ segmentation of staff users for the organisation – according to their professional roles, as tabbed groups, each listing staff electronic records.
Within those role groups staff are further divided into employment relationship to the organisation.
The Teams section of Tempo allows then the design of any bespoke groupings of people, for many purposes: leave rules, capacity planning, line-management and service line intelligence.
But, this initial standard segmentation of staff is important for at least 2 reasons:
- In order to establish a compliant, standardised electronic staff record as a baseline for capacity and a fixed point onto which capacity designs can be anchored.
- For the ability to rota staff, within the right groups
Capacity
Tempo can count organisational workforce capacity in sophisticated ways, including leave, across both baked in segments and arbitrary segments, created by Teams. The baked in segments of capacity are firstly the staff roles shown above and, secondly, the modular structure of the hub itself.
What are modules?
Modules are a way to Demand & capacity. In real terms they are a way to organise rota design across sites, people and services. They are also a way to segment and count capacity.
Handling tutorials by design and with either automation or manual adjustments
Manual adjusting (later to be automated)
When a GP trainer is not available for a tutorial as they are on leave then the tutorial needs to be cancelled and the registrar session would convert to a normal session.
The design behind it
The tutor and the reg both have their sessions within their user week templates. The tutor session are protected and the registrar sessions are flexible – so they can become something else if needed.
The tutor has their tutorial session type on their protected sessions and the reg has not a tutorial session type on their flexible session but a normal registrar session type (that can be used for normal reg session)
Scenarios
WHEN user sessions are toggled ON, in the rota week, we can see where tutorial can happen and where it cannot
WHEN the tutorial happens, the reg session type is changed to their tutored type (for now, manually)
WHEN the tutorial doesn’t happen, the reg session stays as a normal registrar type and they can be assigned supervision to any available supervisor
From template to rota
Creating rota weeks from templates
This describes the ideal steps to take in order to build a rota week, based on having both user templates and organisational templates setup in your hub.
Please read first
An organisation template should contain work that the organisations needs to be done, that can be done by anyone who can do that work.
In this way, the org template contains an expression of core demand that needs to be met, using available staff.
It does not contain work that only one person in your workforce can do.
User templates contain a mixture of work that ONLY that user can do when they are in AND / OR flexible sessions in their week, when they are able to be selected into shifts within an organisation template.
This selection into a shift that’s held in an org template happens in the rota, where user templates and org templates can come together.
In the rota view, you can toggle between seeing org template sessions, user templates sessions as well user flexible or user protected sessions.
Tempo will allow you to select flexible user sessions into org session, where there is an eligibility and using suitability and equity logic
Ideal steps to building a rota from templates
Select ‘Rostering’ > ‘Rotas’ > Amend the ‘Week commencing’ to the chosen date you wish to build a rota for.
Note: according to the setup of week types in the Annual Planner, this week will have a week type, shown top right corner. Templates are connected to the week types in the Annual Planner and this week you aree rotergin with show templates connected. This ensures you use a rota design appropriate for the week of the year, according to pre-planned, seasonal, demand & capacity designs
- Select ‘shift mode’ > ‘org template shifts’
- Load shifts into rota (this is not assignment of people into shifts. Its is selection for assignment later)
- Select ‘shift mode’ > ‘protected user’.
- Load shifts to template.
- Select people into shifts manually or allow Tempo to suggest optimum selection (or both)
- Select ‘shift mode’ > ‘flexible user’ (no need to load. Seeing these is a reference for you)
Only load if adding EXTRA sessions to the rota, because the user flexible sessions allow the users to be selected into the org template sessions that are loaded - Select ‘shift mode’ > ‘Meetings/events’.
- Load meeting / shifts to template. (commit later)
- Check room assignments and BOD numbers
- After the above steps all that remains is actual assignment – from selected people into Assignment. This can be one at a time, or days at a time or the whole week in one go
Demand and capacity management in Primary Care
Taking control of practice operations with demand and capacity management
Author: Joe Aliferis 2023
Digital transformation Lead, Foundry Healthcare, Lewes
CTO, GPnetworks Ltd
Practices already manage demand & capacity
Introduction
The first thing to say is: demand & capacity management is what GP practices already do. The question is: can it be improved?
We know from experience that, using Tempo, improved demand & capacity management is not beyond the capability of existing operational staff. Practices already have the people who can do it – they just haven’t had the tools to do it any better than they currently do (yet).
Demand & capacity is a term that you see being increasingly used in Primary Care. Recently NHS England has begun releasing webinars on the subject, accompanied by diagrams and data. The language used has started to be around using ‘demand & capacity planning tools’. Whilst this is progress, at the same time, it makes it sounds like practices need to ‘add’ something new to their operational management and gain some ‘higher’ level of understanding. We don’t think thats necessarily true and we don’t think it would take very much to get to what NHS England calls ‘demand and capacity management‘ – as we will show.
Tempo is a demand & capacity planning tool (and much more), but with one very important caveat: it’s easy
Tempo simply 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 demand & capacity intelligence, at your finger tips. Then Tempo helps you do something beneficial with that.
In other words, all practices are already doing a form of demand & capacity management. Tempo just takes that to a level that allows a practice to realise the benefits of demand & capacity management. In this sense, Tempo allows practices to take back control and achieve an NHS England standard for Demand & capacity management. 🙂
Taking back control
In this post, we will take a look at the four questions we’ve needed to answer in order to be able to design and build Tempo and why Tempo is the solution that practices are looking for.
- What is demand & capacity management in Primary Care?
- How do we see and measure our demand & capacity in a Practice?
- What is the nature of demand & capacity in Primary Care?
- How do we model our demand & capacity for Primary Care operations?
What is demand & capacity management in Primary Care?
Demand & capacity management as the solution to our problems
It’s widely believed that demand & capacity management is the way to solve the difficulties experienced by Primary Care – namely: not enough clinicians, not enough appointments, providing on the day access, providing continuity of care. In other words, coming up with the best models of practice operation to meet the demand of the patient population, with the workforce capacity and resources that are available. This basically means managing staff leave and designing rotas.
Including time
The missing part of that idea is, of course, time. It would be relatively easy to model demand & capacity as a snapshot. In fact, this is how many practices are forced to manage it, because there has been no tools available to allow the operational model to be ‘dynamically‘ managed over time. Time is the key dimension that has been missing from our models, because time increases the complexity of managing demand & capacity exponentially.
To answer the question: what is demand & capacity management in Primary Care?
Managing demand & capacity over time
Tempo was created because, as a large practice, we could see that there was nothing available to us to help manage demand & capacity over time. In a reduced form, this can be thought of as managing staff work plans, leave and rostering, together, in a joined up way.
Our breakthrough has been not just to create the first properly working version of this solution but also to realise that demand & capacity management is not a NEW type of management. Its the same forms of management, done in a new way, with better tools. This then led us to incorporate much more into in our core solution, such as appointments and finance.
Tempo was designed to be the first user-friendly digital toolset to transform day-to-day practice operational management into demand & capacity management. The Tempo solution is therefore built upon the daily, weekly and monthly management of rota design, appointments, staff, leave, sickness and teams, with finance added on top as an optional additional layer of data, bringing additional insight and planning.
Advanced management does not have to be difficult
As stated above, most practices manage demand & capacity to some extent. But the difference between managing demand & capacity as a snapshot or even as a series of snapshots and modelling demand & capacity over time is where Tempo really provides value to a practice. With Tempo, you will quickly get to managing demand & capacity in a sophisticated way, without changing what you do – just changing how you do it. With our support at every step, you will simply be migrating your work into Tempo.
This will deliver an added bonus of making that work quicker and easier to manage. It can also help to standardise what you do and drives equity.
By this approach, your normal operational events generate a new data set that is the key to taking control of the elusive nature of demand & capacity. Its only when you have this data easily to hand and visualised on screen, that you can model it and start to control it.
Seeing and measuring demand & capacity
The Tempo answer to this is simply to run your operations inside Tempo. This will capture your demand & capacity data, measure and count it and provide a range of tools beyond that, that use your data.
But, what is demand & capacity?
As stated above, practices already know what they are, because they are what you are doing . What is really meant by the question is:
- What is the nature of demand & capacity?
- What does it look like in your system?
- How do you manage it?
Capacity
What is capacity?
In many ways, far simpler than demand and already very well know, capacity is, initially, who you have, what they can do and when they can work.
This, alone, is pretty hard to model, especially over longer time-frames. However, there are other dimensions to capacity that provide opportunities for better demand & capacity modelling and if those can also be captured and modelled, outcomes can be better for everyone.
- Building / Rooms / desks
- Additional roles
- Teams & services
In the simplest form, capacity is a counting exercise. However, once again, when time is introduced, it becomes more complex. In Tempo, capacity is counted for any of its dimensions, at any moment. This ‘nailing down‘ of capacity into what we call the ‘capacity engine‘ and the useful segmentation of it, for different purposes, is a key part of the overall demand & capacity capability of Tempo. This is particularly true when you want to examine your capacity for services, teams and how they can relate to budgets.
What is the nature of capacity?
Like demand, capacity is comprised of the known and unknown. Generally it is more known than demand but, because it does contain unknowns, it only adds to the complexity of managing demand & capacity.
What does capacity look like?
Capacity would come to you in a few forms and in units of time.
- Availability
- Roles & specialisms
- Rooms & desks
- Teams (for patient groups & services)
You may have any number of tools to capture this data. With Tempo, all your capacity is caught and maintained by the Capacity Engine of Tempo. This capacity engine ensures that your most accurate measurements of any type of capacity is available to your plans, models and rotas at all times and for any period of time in your practice year.
Demand
What does demand look like in a practice?
In simple terms, demand is what your patient population need. NHS England webinars can go to great lengths to break this down.
How is this expressed to you, at a practice?
As people asking for appointments. As appointments that the system knows must happen. So, initially demand is broken down into planned and reactive – but, in the end, its all just appointments.
These are then expressed as counts for appointment types, coming to you via the channels you have open to patients:
- Phone calls
- Online appointments
- On site
- Planned appointments
- Follow up appointments
So demand is expressed as a need for appointments. Appointments demand are then re-expressed, by a practice, as a rota. The rota is therefore a best attempt to use available capacity to create a session design that meets the demand. This is demand & capacity management. But why is it so hard to make this yield positive results for patients and for your workforce? Answer: the system is too complex and the tools used are not sophisticated enough or agile enough.
Is demand really knowable?
Yes and no.
Demand is one of those things that is very hard (almost impossible) to pin down, because of its nature. Its too complex and fluid and, most importantly, its usually in the future !
How do we anticipate demand?
Rather than ‘what is demand’, this is the key question and the one that Tempo sets out to solve.
Two things:
- Data on demand
- Capacity planning based on data
The best way for a practice to cater for their demand is to employ a rotering and capacity learning system, running in a continual loop. This sounds fancy but what this really comes down to is to use a unified digital system to run your key operations and for that system to build in the dynamic intelligence of time, so that you transform your day to day operational work into a dynamic demand & capacity system. In other words, Tempo.
- Measure what demand appeared to be in the past
- Set targets for what you think demand will be in the future
- Design your rotas around those targets and plan your workforce capacity for those rotas
- Adjust and fine-tune your output as you approach each week / day in your rota
- Compare what your thought demand would be with what it appeared to be
- Adjust your targets
- Adjust your rotas for the future (or not)
The rota is the expression of demand and capacity management
The rota represents the best attempt to plan for both demand and capacity, whilst trying to deliver services of all types. A rota will always be a best attempt, because the real-world behaves like the weather systems that blow around it – in a somewhat predictable yet chaotic and non-deterministic way.
The question is: how well can a rota anticipate demand and capacity?
We would term rotering in Tempo as ‘demand and capacity based rotering‘ because the combined tools of Tempo are designed around being able to optimise the rota to both anticipate demand and make best use of capacity. Tempo can do this because it contains your demand and capacity data.
What is the nature of demand and how do you model it?
At any time, the nature of demand is a combination of both known and unknown. For any point in the calendar, as that moment approaches, demand usually becomes less unknown. This is the reason why practices hesitate to rota far ahead. This is also compounded by the difficulty of planning leave and accounting for sickness. So, to plan a rota in the future you need to know demand as well as possible, know what time-off looks like and build-in sickness. Why is this so hard to do? Answer: the system is too complex and the tools used are not sophisticated enough, joined up enough or agile enough.
Weather forecasting & rotering
Tackling this disparity between the complexity of what practices are trying to manage and the tools they have to to do it with has been our mission for 3 years. If demand is like the weather and rotering, therefore, like weather forecasting, accepting this elusive nature and designing solutions around it has been the key to the success of Tempo.
Sounds clever, but what does that actually equate to in a practice?
It means Tempo provides the tools to anticipate, plan and adjust for demand. Like weather forecasting tools, you can capture, crunch and visualise a lot of complex data in Tempo and its not difficult to do that – you just do what you normally do in an integrated digital space. You also get lots of useful automation to apply complex rules and speed up intensive tasks AND you get tools that reflect performance back to you. This is what taking control of demand means in Tempo. The additional effect of Tempo is to create a learning system, within which demand & capacity plays a key role.
The answer to the question: what is the nature of demand & capacity and how do you model it?
Then the Tempo learning system automatically kicks in
Modelling your demand & capacity for Primary Care operations
Apart from making it easier to manage complexity day-to-day, the point of capturing your demand & capacity data in one place is to be able to get to the point where you can visualise it and get control over it, plan and set targets and see what those designs look like over a time-line.
The Tempo learning system is self-generating inside your practice account
Just by using Tempo, a learning system is realised through your:
- Annual week planner
- Rota templates
- Teams management
- Leave management
- Rotering
These screen provide real-time, calculated demand & capacity data to you about:
- Rooms
- Appointments
- Access
- Costs
- Service lines
What is the end result of a Tempo upgrade?
This is the fun part, where you realise a level of control over demand & capacity that creates stability, assurance and satisfaction.
At this point, you and your practice operations team will have been through these steps with our team supporting you:
- Onboarding workforce
- Setting up work plans
- Setting up initial teams
- Managing time-off
- designing rota templates & session templates
- Creating supervision rules and meetings rules
- Deploying a rota
- Setting up financial data
When we have completed these steps together, you will be running your operations within Tempo. At this point, it will be far easier to run those processes day to day and far easier to handle changes day to day but, also Tempo will be providing you with a powerful demand & capacity management tool and a learning system.
The Tempo tools allow you to run your operations with confidence, for any point in the calendar and the learning system allows you to learn from the data and plan any changes you are considering.
At this point, your practice will be managing demand & capacity in way that exceeds the expectations of NHS England, makes your staff happier, improves your service delivery and saves money.
This is the Tempo solution for Demand and capacity management in Primary Care
🙂
Modules, locations & rooms
What is a module?
Tempo rotas are firstly, grouped into Modules
Everyone knows what a Practice location is and what a room is, but what is a module?
Modules are the key additional element that allows for a better utilisation of locations and rooms.
A module is a bit of additional (notional) structure within rota design, that creates the basis for better flexibility in rota sessions.
A module is a way to firstly. ask: “What team is this work for” BEFORE asking “where is this work being done?”
When you add this additional bit of structure to a rota, as a top level grouping of work, it enables work to be done anywhere in the organisation (include at home or in a virtual location) and for that work to be properly counted for the group it belongs to.
Modules enable a more flexible use of locations across the whole organisation.
After work is first identified in the module it belongs to, locations and rooms can be assigned to that work, based on a priority.
Example
PCN work (module)
– Practice site 1
— Room 1
— Room 2
– Practice site 2
— Room 1
— Room 2
– Virtual location
The annual planner and rota week types
How to use the Annual planner
The Annual Planner is a place where rota template design meets seasonal week planning. IN the Planner calendar you can connect your rota template designs to any number of week ‘type’ that you want to create and connect those to the actual weeks of the year.
This action connects your template designs to the weeks of the year in the rotering screen and ensures targets and counts are defined across different weeks of the year.
In the annual planner calendar, we use the drop down at the top/left of each week, to set the week type for that week.
The things that are part of Annual week planning:
- The week types
- The templates
- The Annual Planner calendar
At the top of the planner, you can see the week types you have created. Edit them or make new ones until you have the latest set of week types you need for a year.
In the planner calendar, go to each week of the year and use the drop down to set the proper week type for that week.
The last part, after setting this schedule up, is having enough variations of templates to match the week types you created.
Each templates can be assigned to a week type (in template edit screen)
When templates are assigned to a week type, they will show in the annual planner, when they are appropriate
Duplicate / copy rota templates
You can copy any template to another template
Even an organisation template to a user template
To duplicate a template to a person, for example:
Go to your Rota Templates and open the template to duplicate
Example: pharmacist template
Once in this view, click the ‘Week templates’ button to open the options
In the popup modal, select User template option and then choose the person from the dropdown – that you want to clone the template to
Note
Don’t forget to name the new template being created and then click Save (the green button bottom left)
This creates the persons template and takes you to the edit view of that template, where you can edit it and connect it to their work plan
Then Save that
User templates versus org templates
How to use them and why
Why have two types of session?
Because practice rotering needs to combine the rota of an individual with the additional rota needs of the organisation, we have solved this complexity by splitting the two types out, into two different rota templates and, within those templates, defining the two types of session.
This means that the two types of template can overlap and Tempo can intelligently work out how overlapping sessions interact to create a complete, workable, practice rota.
Org templates only contain organisation type sessions and do not need names assigned to them.
User week templates can contain BOTH org sessions and user sessions.
User sessions are protected. This means they are generally not suitable for transformation into something else, within a rota.
An example of an org type session in a practice rota is a Duty session. That could be GP Duty or something else, such as Pharmacist Duty. The key thing is that, it is a session that usually has to happen, within an organisational rota.
This is distinct from the ‘protected‘ sessions contained within a staff user template
The staff user week template is a design of the weekly plan and expectations of the staff user.
User week templates can contain two types of session: org sessions and non-org, protected sessions.
This ‘org’ or ‘protected’ attribute of a session is set, by the hub, for any session type, within the session type management screen.
https://tempo.gpnetworks.co.uk/hub_admin/pcn/session_types
Session type example
In a person’s week design, the org type session is given to those sessions that become the ones that can transfrom into an org session in a practice rota
Rota = where user and org templates come together and create rota sessions and assignments
Pharmacist examples
In one example, a pharmacist for who all her sessions can be transformed into organisation sessions in a rota – the sessions in her week template design are all of a session type that is an ORG session type and the org template contains all these sessions too but without a person associated to the sessions.
In another example, pharmacist with their weeks sessions designed in their user template and the organisation needs a duty pharmacist.
That duty session would be in an org template AND be a session in the users weeks that is using an ORG session type,
This setup tells the rota that the session can be transformed into an org session in a rota.
So, between the design of the user template and the org template, we’re telling Tempo rota how to handle overlap and transformation of a person’s week, to the rota requirements of organisation
Simple leave management
Manage leave without computing entitlements
Rotering in Tempo
Tempo rotas
Doing what you are familiar with in a live capacity environment
Tempo rotering has been developed to replicate exactly how practices rota but, crucially, to take those methods and place them into a real-time system, connecting all the elements that are the basis of a rota together in a live environment. This is simply a much more powerful way of doing the same thing.
The Tempo approach means that, while practice operational staff will find the key parts of a Tempo rota familiar, the weekly rota design process can be done with real-time operational intelligence. Tempo is able to effortlessly bring this to the rota design process for the manager.
Key practice rota concepts found in Tempo
The repeating rota of the individual staff user
The weekly appointment targets of the organisation – such as GP Duty
The additional scheduled rota elements such as meetings, tutorials or other events
The actual leave of staff
The leave rules of teams
Sickness (planned and ad-hoc)
Registrar sessions (supervision)
Locum cover
Overtime / TOIL
Rota templates
Setting up rota templates in Tempo
Tempo practice rotering works by combining planned weeks, in the form of templates, with the adjustments and nuance of the real-world.
Practice rota templates can be stored in two distinct parts: organisation templates and staff user templates.
These two parts, combined with the rota itself create what we call the Tempo rota face.
Staff user templates
Staff user templates capture a key part of practice rotering – the planned weeks and the week design of each rostered member of staff. These, alone, could form the major part of a practice rota and, in Tempo, once these individual weeks are built, a weekly rota can almost be automated.
Staff user templates
These templates bring into the practice rota:
- A detailed count of the capacity of your practice workforce, per site, per role, per week
- A design for the way each session within a persons week can be combined with organisation templates to create the practice rota
A GP week rota template
Work plan management for a staff user
Connecting a work plan to a week template
Organisation templates
The purpose of these is to capture a plan for the scheduled / shared work such as duty sessions and other similar types. This can be as simple or as intricate as is needed.
A typical organisation week template can look something like this:
A GP week rota template
Staff placement would be decided later, within an actual rota week.
Creating an organisation template
It’s very easy to create one of these in Tempo and templates can be copied and modified easily. Simply go to the Rota menu and drop down to Week templates to access the place where all templates are kept. Here you can edit an existing template, copy a template, or create a new one.
Rota and template structure within a hub
When we setup a Tempo hub we ask questions about the organisation: the sites and rooms, the services and the patient groups. This is so that we can setup the rotas with the sections and groupings to match your needs. These can be modified later and are configurable from within the hub settings.
The rota screen is divided into what Tempo calls ‘modules’.
A module can contain any group of sites and locations. Modules provide a flexibility that allows us to match rotering to any design of services and any approach.
Modules can be modified, turned on/off and combined into module groups.
Organisation templates are associated to a module
While staff templates are simply connected to a staff user work plan, organisation templates are associated with the parts of this modular structure. In other words, organisation templates are created associated with a module.
Video demonstration
Study leave
Setting study leave per staff role
The time-off hub settings controls the application of study leave on a per staff role basis
https://tempo.gpnetworks.co.uk/leave/hub_time_off_settings
Blending study leave (or not)
In each users staff profile, a setting determines if SL is separated from leave entitlement, into a separate ‘pot’ or blended with annual leave entitlement, into 1 pot, combining them both.
If separate, then the staff user can choose which pot they are using when requesting time-off
If blended, then a staff user does not need to choose which pot time-off is coming from. Its all one pot of time to be used as they wish. The actual time-off entries can still attribute the time-off to SL if wanted.
Staff users and onboarding
Join the network / join the hub
Accessing the system first
- Staff users need a free account on the system before they can use an account to join to a hub
- A staff user can have a network / system account and not be joined to a hub
- A staff user account can connect with more than one hub
Sometimes, because of this, joining a hub can be a 2 stage process:
- Registering for a staff user account
- Login and join to a hub in the Hub management section
The app vs the browser
Staff can use app or browser to access their account. Same login.
When you login using a browser your Dashboard will show links to the two app stores
Apple
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/workforce-from-gpnetworks/id1474686342
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.gpnetworks.app
You can and search both app stores – search ‘Workforce GPnetworks’
Once installed, open app and login
(we have been made aware of some rare cases where the app tells the user that it is not compatible. We know what causes this now and have to publish an app update)
In the meantime, even using the native browser on a phone or tablet will look and work just like the app does.
Browser URL
https://tempo.gpnetworks.co.uk
Whatever route a person takes to get to their account, all functionality is the same and all logins the same. It’s one system with a few different entry points.
Staff users
Staff logging in after a bulk import by us
When we bulk import staff users for a hub, we auto complete the user account registration step for users without an existing account, then join that user to the hub they are already part of.
We then send a file that contains staff user credentials to the hub manager
There may be a few members of staff who already had an account on the system, so they won’t be included in this import or the file but they will get joined to the hub.
If they are not existing users, its usual for them to need some help with their first steps.
Invalid login credentials
There is password reset on the home page of the site and on the app start screen. It’s found in within the Login feature ‘forgot p[password’
It will ask for the email address in the account and generate a new password, sending it to that email address
NOTE
Sometimes this email does not seem to arrive (caught in a person spam filter). It would only take 5 mins to come at most, so get in touch with me if it does arrive. I can find this and help.
Help and support information
In the browser, there is Help menu containing links to account support for staff online, in the form of short videos and an archive of articles. There is also direct support myself and Tom, via email.
https://tempo.gpnetworks.co.uk
The help menu for staff
https://support.gpnetworks.co.uk
Short videos for staff users on the support portal (I will be adding more shorts to the collection)
https://support.gpnetworks.co.uk/video-how-to/
New staff (having an account AND not having an account on the system)
Any new staff joining Charter, may or may not have an account on the system already.
If they DO have an account, they simply need to visit their Hub management section and Add Charter hub to their connections.
This will inform you and place them into the disabled tab for their staff role (HCA, GP, etc)
All the info from their account will appear in their record, within your hub and you can enable them for your hub whenever you like. This will let them know.
If they DO NOT have an account o the system, they can register for one for free on the home page, then, once that process is complete (20-30 mins) follow the above steps to join Charter.
https://tempo.gpnetworks.co.uk/
There is also an option to join a Hub during the registration process, if they see this and use it, it saves steps and some time for them and us.
Signup for an account form is accessed via menu on home page (staff users should NOT choose the last option)
———
Hub Administrators
A person could have dual roles as a staff user and an Administrator.
For this they need 2 accounts on the system, each using an unique email)
Anyone can always register for a new account (the bottom option in that Signup menu is the Administrator role) – they will just need an email NOT already in the system.
Support for Administrators
Our Team provides business hours user support via email
For Hub managers (Administrators) there is additional supporting information in their help menu
There is also a support Ticket system.
The Manager support portal provides a searchable FAQ (I am also adding to this all the time)
https://tempo.gpnetworks.co.uk/about-tempo/portal
———
Remote teams support sessions
We provide drop-in sessions in the week of staff user onboarding
Year weeks
Week types
Each hub can design its own collection of Year-weeks.
These are types of week, spanning a whole year, that require a different approach to the rota design. Typically this would be ‘Normal week’, ‘Half-term week’, ‘Christmas week’, ‘Easter weeks’ and so on.
Year weeks are connected to a yearly calendar. This creates a basis for a hub to apply different rules to weeks within a rota.
Create and manage week types
Week types are fairly basis in themselves but create a container for lots of rotering related logic and link rotering rules to different weeks of the year.
Videos
Video support library
We maintain a growing number of how-to support video clips on our support portal here
Glossary of Terms
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Module | Organisational rota & template segments. Modules contain a rota and templates are designed for modules. Example: PCN module. Modules can be sites, places, virtual or a combination of things. They exist to segment rostering into useful groups. Modules can adapt over time. new module can be added and modules disabled (hidden). |
| Module group | Modules can be grouped so that rota designs can be seen grouped together and rota module templates can be designed that span multiple modules. This supports planning output across a range of services. |
| Rota | The design of sessions, either individually or grouped as 'clinics'. Rotas span days and weeks, matching the built-in day design of the hub they belong to. Rotas are comprised of sessions that can have session types and contain opportunities for assignment and assignments. Rotas have a calculated output and can express room use and many other things. |
| Location | A place where a session happens. These are usually sites, that sometimes include a room but can be virtual locations too. Locations are connected to modules by hub configuration and create the options when sessions are being created for the module rota. |
| Room | An optional additional specific location for a session. Rooms have a capacity, can express attributes such as capability and form a room capacity report, beneath a rota. |
| Team | An additional abstract way to group and segment staff users. Teams can be simple staff segments, used to understand appointment output or costs. They can also be management teams, that group staff users with hub managers for line-management. Teams can also be leave teams, with custom leave rules foreach role within the team, for each of the hub year/weeks that the hub has created in order to build rota templates that match output to demand across a year. |
| Workforce | multi-disciplinary, mixed staff user accounts, spanning clinical and non-clinical roles, all employment types, locums, registrars, managers and can also include volunteers. The hub workforce is the basis of the hubs capacity can respond to requirements in a hub rota, with assignment and self-assignment controlled by Hub managers. |
| Hub | An organisation within the network. A hub can be joined by network users of any type and employment status. Hub managers control access to their hub, build rota designs and rotas within the hub modules and many other things. Hubs have built in reporting, can create their own insights. Can build their own flexible staff bank and much more. |
| Employer | A pseudonym for a hub. An organisation that employs staff. |
| Pool | A useful segment of a hub workforce. Pools are built-in and reflect some key attributes within the profile of the staff user in the hub workforce and the hub, such as employment status, work plans and more. Pools an intuitive way to solve rota requirements in a priority order. |
| Job plan | A simple breakdown of an internal staff users contracted week, with some other key attributes related to pay, site and team. A job plan is the basis of entitlement calculations, overtime and more. Staff users can have multiple job plans but only 1 active plan. |
| Work plan | A more detailed rota type new of an internal staff users contested work, capturing their predefined sessions and their flexible sessions in one weekly template. Work plans are a powerful aspect of hub rostering and can interact with other elements in the rota design phase. |
| Template | A design of rota output, for a designed hub module/year/week. Templates are a powerful planning tool, can count appointment output and other attributes and can be used to build module rotas very quickly. They can be adapted and tested as part of demand & capacity approach to rostering. |
| Year week | A critical part of demand & capacity planning, the year week allows the hub to map out the key differences in its rota output over a whole year and beyond. Module rota templates are attached to year weeks in an annual planner view. Team leave rules are connect with year weeks. |
| Session type | A useful taxonomy to segment sessional output into any meaningful design and capture output in a formally segmented way. Session types can also capture some key attributes and be associated with other elements of rostering. |
| Slot type | A mirror of slot types in your clinical system. These can be imported and managed within Tempo. Slot types have a few important attributes. |
| Slot type template | These are rota session templates that mirror those in the clinical system, comprised of your slot types. They break the session down into its component parts, allowing of all work and appointment counts. |
| Specialism | An additional clinical capability assigned to a staff user. These can be managed as a table and assigned to staff in their profile. Specialisms can be used to determine assignability and to determine additional roles. |
| Capability | Similar to specialisms but covering a wider range of clinical & non-clinical capabilities. An example of this is Care Coordinator, a capability for a receptionist. |
| Assignment | Placing a staff user into a session. Creating a commitment for the staff user in a rota. There are two types: Assignment by a Hub Admin and self-assignment, by a staff user. Hub admins control all aspects of assignment. |
| Self-assignment | A form of assignment that the Hub admin has delegated to the staff user or to a pool of staff. |
| Ask | A way to send a direct request to a staff user for self-assignment. |
Workforce pools & work plans
What are workforce pools?
Workforce pools provide a useful grouping of a mixed workforce.
Pools can support an intuitive, priority based approach to solving rota requirements.
The pools help to segment and understand your workforce, in terms of of trust, work commitment, accessability and cost.
The workforce pools,
- Partners
- Employed staff (not a partner)
- Staff bank
- Staff bank flexible staff
- Flexible staff
———— - Network locums
Tempo workforce pools in relation to your hub and the wider network
Work plans
Within a hub workforce, some staff will have a work plan.
This is a defined and agreed pattern of weekly work, spanning a time period. Work plans can cover whole financial years or parts of a year. Work plans can combine iver a year, to create a whole entitlement. Work plans can be inactive when no longer in date and a user only ever has 1 active work plan. The active plan has a date in the future or no end date.
Within a workforce, staff accounts that are contracted to the hub organisation have a work plan. This defines their agreement of work, pay and entitlements (for the plan).
There are 2 types of work plan: the first, the basic type that every eligible staff user will have, just contains a breakdown of the contracted hours the user will work within that hub, in hours or sessions, per day.
A user can have a work plan with multiple hubs but work plans cannot overlap.
Work plans form the basis of entitlements and pay for a hub and allow auto calculation of overtime and TOIL from rotas.
Annualiased flexible work plans
Some staff users want to create a special agreement with a hub, to work parts of the year. An example of this is the term time contract.
We use annualised work plans to handle this.
An annualised plan, allows a pre-defined amount of the year to be deducted within the agreement and for entitlements to follow naturally.
Users with annualised plans and users with ordinary plans can then see a live running calculation of their entitlements and deductions, TOIL and more and can use the built in tools within their account to request and book time-off across all types, paid and unpaid, deductible and non-deductible.
Assignment
Assignment
Assignment is the action in a rota, where a commitment is made for someone.
Assignment is when the idea or plan to place someone into a session, becomes a scheduled event.
When assignment happens, the person is informed, via the system. Their account will show the session as assigned to them, they wont be able to be assigned elsewhere at the same time and the session is not available to someone else (unless its a duplicate session)
Self-assignment
Self-assignment is the action taken by a staff user, where a commitment is made by responding to an opportunity for self-assignment in a rota.
When self-assignment happens, the rota manager is informed, via the system. The staff user account will show the session as assigned to them, they wont be able to be assigned elsewhere at the same time and the session is not available to someone else (unless its a duplicate session)
Rules
There are a number of logical rules around assignment and self-assignment that govern when and how they can happen in a rota.
Rota mangers can control session attributes within the rota design that will bring rules into play. This allows them to control the manner in which they solve their session requirements using their available workforce, spanning all types of staff account relationships and over time, in a manner that suits.
A session can marked as self-assignable
This makes the session visible to any eligible users in the hub workforce and is assigned by the staff user, on a first-come-first-served basis
A session can be marked an Internal only
This ensures the session is only assignable to a member of the internal workforce pool within the hub workforce. The internal workforce pool can include flexible workers as well as contracted staff. It can also include external employed staff. The pool membership is managed by the Hub team.
A session can have a specialist capability added to it
This will restrict assignment for the session to staff users in the workforce who have that matching capability in their Profile. These capabilities of users are managed by the Hub team
A rota manager can send an ASK request to a staff user for self-assignment
This sends the staff user and email and app-push notification that contains a link to accept or decline the request. On accepting, the staff user is assigned to the session.
An ASK can be sent regardless of whether self-assignment is On or OFF for the session
Eligibility & availability
If all other conditions are met regarding user type and any specialist capabilities, a staff user is eligible for assignment to a session if they are available. A hub manager can set a rota to REQUIRE explicit staff user availability in order to assign or can set a rota to NOT require availability. In the latter case, its only required that the staff user is NOT UNAVAILABLE (in other words, not already booked for a session that clashes)
Rotas
Comms
Comms
There are a number of channels of communication for a hub, some of them individual communications between a manager and a staff user, some of them bulk comms, between a manager and a segment of the hub workforce or the whole workforce.
The communications span a few digital mediums:
Email
Tempo generating an external email to a user
App push
Tempo generating a message to a users app, on their device
Internal system / account level messages
Tempo generating a message that appears within a user account in Tempo (this is usually backed by an external communication too)
How communciations are created
Transactional messages
Some messages are generated automatically, by the system, as a result of some action or activity within the system and as a part of a logical workflow / process between hub and user. These are known as ‘transactional communications’.
Example 1:
A hub Admin creates a session in a rota and allows ‘self-assignment’. The system generates a weekly summary of any sessions available to self-assign, for each eligible staff user in the hub workforce and sends this as an email, containing links to self-assign to sessions.
Example 2:
A hub admin enables a new user into their hub, after checking their profile. The system generates an email notification to the user to let them know.
Overtime & invoices
Tempo has powerful options for handling overtime, generating reports and/or invoices for the hub and for the individual user.
Overtime for rotered staff
Staff that are rotered have their sessions automatically mapped to their work plan, so that any time rotered that is outside of a work plan, the system will recognise this as ask the rota team manager how to handle it?
The rota team manager choose how to handle it in each case.
TOIL = adds TOIl to the persons leave entitlemrnt calculations and show this is both the Managers TOIL report and the users leave management calcs
Overtime = adds the extra work to the monthly overtime report, for the user and uses overtime rates to calculate the additional pay
Ignore = just ignore this
Invoice = add the extra time and pay to an auto generated invoice for the user and store this in the Invoice management screen and in the users invoice screen
Overtime for non-rotered staff
Some staff users are opted out of being rotered and therefore manage their work plans in a flexible way For these it is not possible to calculate any overtime within a rota,
In this case, Tempo provides a simple way for them to add their overtime to their time-off management screen and have that approved by their manager in the same workflow as leave is requested and approved. This will then become an entry in an overtime report, for the user.
Permissions
What are Permissions?
- Permissions are a way to control the things that each hub admin can do, within their account, in terms of a particualr hub.
- Permissions can vary according to hub admin & hub.
- Permissions offer a granular control over the screens and functionality of the hub
Note:
There is a super admin level of permission which once set, cannot be removed by another hub admin
The Super admin is the user with the level of permissions that is permits them to manage the permissions of other hub admins (for the same hub)
Slot types & rota templates
Specialisms & capabilities
The purpose of specialisms
Specialisms and capabilities are a separately managed library within the hub. They are an important and useful attribute that connects staff to sessions.
How they work
Any specialism or capability you create in your library, can be assigned to eligible staff (this is done by role).
The same specialism or capability can also connected to Session types.
These two connects mean that, within a rots design, a Session type can understand the eligibility of staff within the hub workforce and bring some logical rules into play, to support the rota team
Rooms
Shift types & pseudo roles
What are shift types?
Shift types provide a way to design a category of user/role based control over shift assignment in a rota
A shift type attribute on a rota shift means that the range of workforce staff that can be assigned or self-assign to the shift is reduced to those that match booth the user type suitability rules AND have the shift type capability given to them in their profile.
We can separately setup as many shift types as we like and link them to our hub user types and built-in roles.
When can give shift type capabilities to our workforce users
We can set the shift type attribute at the shift level – which means the shift requires the capability from the user
Modules & module groups
Rates & fees
Pay rates
Where does a pay rate come from?
For any session in a rota, an associated rate of pay can come from a number of places:
- A standard pay rate – from a table of standard rates
- An over time rate – from a table fo standard overtime rates
- A special pay rate rule – from a rule that is setup to target that type of session
- A users work plan rate – from the work plan in their profile
- A users custom pay rate – from the custom rate fields in their profile
- A shift rate – from a specula rate, applied directly onto the shift itself in a rota
There is a built in logic that determines where a rate of pay for a session comes from, that is determined by a few factors:
- The users employment status in the hub that the rota is within
- The users work plan in that hub (if they have one)
- A users custom rate over rides within that hub (if they exist)
- The type of session in the rota (normal, locum, overtime)
- Special pay rate rules defined within the hub that target that session in a rota
Managing pay rates
Tracing & changing a pay rate
For any session in a rota, the pay rate that has been attributed can be found in an assignment report.
Within this report, a rate of pay for a session of a number of sessions can be recalculated. This is useful if changes have been made and the past needs to be recalculated.
Once a pay rate for a session has been recalculated, any reports of views of that rate in the system will show the new rate.
Standard rate tables
A standard table provides a starting point for a pay rate to be calculated as well as a fall back for any work where a rate is not defined elsewhere
Reports & exports
HR, docs & certificates
The staff user perspective
A staff account user is able to manage all their documents and certificates within their Profile as well as add any additional qualification or competencies to their Profile.
These help employers they connect with to see their suitability for particular types of work.
The principle is that, the information they create within their Profile is shared with the employers they choose to connect with, within the network. Many employers have a hub so using the hub management section of their account, they can control which hubs they are connected with. As well as this, if they choose to be visible as a locum in the network, practices can see their profile information and request them for cover.
Hub interactions with their information
Hubs maintain and manage a workforce within their account. They onboard staff users that join their hub by verifying the information that the staff user profile shares with their hub and generating their own compliance process and compliance related information, stored at their end. Once a hub has onboarded a staff user, they will enable the user within their hub. This means they are eligible for assignment to requirements within their hub rotas.
They can leave a hub by disconnecting within their hub management screen. This removes their information from the hub but not a history of their rota activity or the information the hub may have generated related to your compliance for the hub.
Hub requirements
Hubs can have slightly different document / certificate requirements. These are expressed through the docs and certs management in their account as required or not required documents. Generally, it’s best for a staff user to upload as many documents and certificates as possible into their profile to maximise their opportunity with hubs.
Expiry dates
Some certificates have expiry dates. These can be set when a staff user uploads the file to their profile. Hubs can also see any relevant dates. Expired certificates are the same as not having a certificate uploaded in that they can prevent a staff user being compliant to a hub and not being eligible to work in that hub.
Reminders
The system will send document expiry date reminders to staff and hub users in advance of a document in a profile expiring and another notification when a document expires. Hub administrators can also see expired documents and will also be notified by the system when an active member of their hub workforce has a document expire.
Troubleshooting
Unable to assign a staff member to a session
You have created a rota session but cannot see a staff member in the drop down of eligible staff for assignment
There are few possible reasons for this:
Drop downs are designed to provide intelligence – that is to say that they try to show staff names, ranked, according to a useful set of rules
- Eligibility
- Suitability
- Equity
The first of these, eligibility, is what could cause a staff member not to show in a drop down
Eligibility is where Tempo determines if someone is capable for a session in a rota
To be eligible, someone must first match the staff type of the rota shift. For example a nurse cannot be eligible for a GP shift or vice versa.
Then, if a session has specialism applied to it, the staff member must have that specialism applied to their Profile – to say they are capable of doing this specific type of work.
This is also true for social shift types.
As well as these things, a staff member who could be eligible may not be, due to the fact that their profile is not completed appropriately. The key thing is usually the required documents in the profile not being uploaded or ‘ignore missing docs’ is not ticked but a person may also be excluded from being eligible for assignment by an employent status. If a shift is specified as internal and a staff member has not be given the internal member attribute, they would not be eligible.
Suitability
After eligibility, comes suitability. Tempo takes all those eligible for a session and looks at who is most suitable. Suitability looks at a number of factors but, unlike eligibility, is not black and white, on or off. Suitability is about ranking stability.
Key factors for high suitability
- Location of session in rota matches usual location set for staff member in their work plan
- Not working elsewhere already
- Not being on leave at the time of the session
Less suitable people are often shown, further down the list but, if suitability matching means people fall outside the established suitability groups, Tempo may ask you to ASK the person if they wish to cover the session, rather than let you simply assign them. This is because they are deemed to not be expecting this assignment.
Not able to self-assign
Staff unable to see a session or self-assign
I put on a session in my Tempo rota but some or all my eligible staff cannot see the session in their Staff app Schedule.
Reasons:
Main reason: the session is not advertised for self-assignment. This is something set at the rota level or at the individual session level – by the rota team
Other reasons: mapping
Tempo rotering intelligence is all about ‘mapping’ between people, shifts, sessions and locations. A rota screen controls who can see a session based on any combinations of these things.
- A staff member needs a specialism or a shift capability because the session type has been connected to a specialism
- A staff user is the wrong staff type for the session because the session is rotered within a different staff type
- A staff user has something in their Profile that prevents them being eligible for assignment. The most likely is either missing documents that are required by the hub or missing documents and the ‘ignore missing documents’ is not ticked
