E-rostering For NHS Trusts
HealthRota is a rota planning application for NHS trusts, offering flexible and staff friendly e-rostering solutions to ensure a fair, transparent and sustainable working schedule.
HealthRota is a rota planning application for NHS trusts, offering flexible and staff friendly e-rostering solutions to ensure a fair, transparent and sustainable working schedule.
Working with NHS consultants, HealthRota has been designed from the ground up to meet the needs of the NHS.
Offering Rota Members some degree of choice of shift dates and working patterns can help hugely with staff hiring, moral and retention. HealthRota supports multiple modes of self rostering to help provide a more personalised schedule.
HealthRota allows rota administrators to plan balanced rotas, and reports on how many and which type of shift members are planned in hours or ‘programmed activity’ (PA) units.
HealthRota provides real-time rule checking across rotas and implements standard rule sets such as the European Working Time Directive and NHS 2016 contract.
Where Rota Members find themselves scheduled to work on a day that is inconvenient, they sometimes need to swap or transfer a shift to a colleague. Rota members can arrange swaps and give ups between themselves.
The HealthRota mobile app gives all rota members a view onto their schedule including shifts across rotas. In addition it gives them the ability to book leave, SPAs and record unavailability.
Importing your existing rota into HealthRota is very straightforward.
There are a few simple screens where you provide details of your rota, and all aspects of the rota are highly configurable, including:
Contract details: contracted working hours, leave totals and employment rules
Ideal Staffing levels: job types, target staffing numbers, vacancy tracking
Shift times and details: times and locations of shifts, weekend and holiday shifts, shift ‘rates’
As soon as these details have been entered, you can start planning your rota. Each member of the rota can be invited to view the rota and each rota can have multiple administrators. Large existing rotas can easily be imported from a pre-formatted Excel sheet in order to save time.
With the advent of the 2016 contract and the EWTD, it is becoming increasingly difficult to check initial rota specifications against the relevant rules, and to ensure that changes, swaps and give ups maintain that integrity.
HealthRota makes this a trivial operation as each member has the rules applicable to them recorded in their contract, and all changes to shifts, timings or overruns are immediately reflected in the rota.
Where applicable, Rota Members can report extra hours worked to their supervisor using HealthRota, as well as any exception reports for issues that have affected their shifts.
For other legal environments, for example Northern Ireland, custom rule sets can be created and used for rules checking.
HealthRota supports both regular template based repeating rotas and more dynamic annualised rotas with rota meetings or full self rostering. Increasingly the departments using HealthRota are finding that by offering the flexibility for people to choose or influence when and where they work, they are able to improve recruitment, morale and staff retention.
Of course, different styles of rota management are applicable across the various staff grades, and HealthRota can be customised to work with a composite of regular template rota generation, managed rota entry and self-rostering approaches.
Where people do find themselves working shifts that clash with important personal events, our shift swap and give up functions allow members to exchange shifts without having to involve lots of administration steps.
One of the challenges of rota building is demonstrating to everyone on the rota that they are working has a fair share of the shifts, and that they are only delivering the hours for which they are contracted.
HealthRota has an advanced reporting function that can detail for each individual, precisely how many hours or PAs they are contracted to work in the planning period or rotation, exactly how the shifts that they are working count towards those totals with a shift by shift breakdown of hours or PAs across weekends and bank holidays.
The detailed shift limit and shift counting functions ensure that when self rostering, it is simple for everyone to understand the requirements for how many of each shift they need to work. The combination of the two mechanisms ensures that everyone is treated fairly.
The HealthRota mobile app gives rota members a clear view of their shifts, leave and planned activities, wherever they are, always up to date.
You can see all the details of your shifts, including information on who you are working with.
This rota system is the only one that I know on the market that works the way we run our rotas at Brighton with self rostering, annualisation and the ability to rota clinical fellows easily.
Consultant BSUH NHS Trust
The HealthRota system is hosted by us in an Amazon AWS data centre in order to keep costs to a minimum by sharing resources as much as possible. As a result, there are no servers or infrastructure to install or maintain, and everyone gets the benefits of Amazon state of the art data centre security and reliability.
Each user connects to the rota through a standard web browser: Chrome (recommended), Safari, Firefox and Opera are all supported. The system works well on Windows and Apple PCs as well as Android and Apple tablets and smart-phones. As there is no software to install, the desktop engineering efforts for installation are minimal.
