NHS or National Health Service is a UK-wide agency that provides healthcare to UK residents. The agency needs a varied mix of skills to meet the large variety of healthcare demands placed upon its centers. At the same time, the individual centers of the agency cannot be expected to be staffed with all kinds of specialists to meet needs that might arise infrequently.

The result has been that there could be unfilled vacancies in shift rosters. Traditionally, these had been filled with the help of outside agency staff. In fact, agency staff expenses have been estimated at nearly 5% of total payroll costs at NHS.

Agency staff is not only expensive but also might not come with the exact skill set required by a center for a shift. Additionally, the center might face problems complying with working time regulations if it employs outside agency staff.

NHS Staff Banks

NHS has created staff banks with specialist skills, such as nursing skills. It is possible to control the quality of their work as the bank staff can be provided necessary training.

Whenever there is an unfilled vacancy in a shift, it can be communicated to the NHS bank calling for applicants. In such a scenario, recourse need be made to outside agency only if there is no suitable NHS bank staff available.

NHS Bank Administration

Even NHS bank staff is comparatively expensive compared to in-house staff. NHS bank administration systems should hence exhaust internal resources fully before seeking bank staff. This would require highly efficient rostering systems that fully considers availability of internal staff and skills and matches them optimally to healthcare requirements.

A manual rostering system cannot hope to do this as well as a custom-developed NHS rostering software. The latter can employ very complex programming algorithms to generate the best possible matching of skill sets and healthcare requirements, and produce shift rosters that utilize internal resources to the maximum extent possible.

If internal staff is just not available, the system can be configured to use the NHS bank resources next. There are systems that can even confirm availability of bank staff before rostering them to shifts.

Only if NHS bank staff is also not available do the system seek to use the most expensive external agency resources.

Cost Effective Solution to the Issue of Temporary Staff

NHS Bank Administration module of NHS healthcare rostering systems can thus provide a cost effective solution to the problem of vacant shifts. Instead of immediately resorting to external agencies, whether they are NHS bank staff or external agency staff, an attempt is made to utilize internal resources fully.

Whereas human schedulers cannot hope to consider all the complex variables and available alternatives, that too in the short time available, computer programs designed specifically for NHS healthcare can do so. Such programs can also accommodate sudden changes necessitated by last minute change requests from staff.

NHS Bank Administration and NHS Healthcare Software together can thus provide the best of possible options to provide quality healthcare at lower costs.