Smarter Healthcare Staffing and Scheduling

According to research published in the Lancet 2.8 million people over the age of 64 in the United Kingdom will need nursing care and assistance by the year 2025. Disabilities related to dementia are expected to rise 40% and other disabilities by 31% in the 65-84 age demographic.

This comes at the time when the country is already facing shortages in nursing staff. In January of 2018, there were more than 34 000 full-time vacancies in nursing which have reportedly risen to 43 000 vacancies in just 4 months by May 2018.

This endangers patient safety and quality of care and places existing staff members under undue stress.

If demand for labour increases while supply stagnates or decreases then the only plausible way forward is to find smarter ways to organise work. We are confident that PARiM is one viable solution that you can start using today.

Scheduling: the Key to Providing Better Healthcare

What can we do to concretely aid the healthcare sector? Somewhat surprisingly, the logistics and scheduling of care may be more important than the treatment itself. The PwC report on latest healthcare industry trends for 2018 highlights this:

" Dr. David Berg, co-founder of Redirect Health, a Phoenix-based company partnering with employers to simplify healthcare for lower-wage employees. “Nope. The most important part of getting good results is not the knowledge of the doctors, not the treatment, not the drug. It’s the logistics, the social support, the ability to arrange to babysit.”

Scheduling also makes sense as a priority because existing staff need to cover more ground and things must work like clockwork for there to even be a chance for organisations to keep up with demand. At the same time, you can't forget that your management has almost no time for learning a new system.

How PARiM Can Help You Today

PARiM fits the above requirements. Less tech-savvy healthcare administrators may particularly find useful PARiM's easy drag and drop feature which allows one to assign or reassign shifts to specific staff members in an instant. This is how it works:

PARiM becomes even easier to use once you turn on our select mode feature which enables 1-click copy and pasting of shifts from one staff member or pool of open shifts to another staff member. Alternatively, when creating a new shift your administrators can pick dates to duplicate certain shifts from a calendar picker. If your administrators can copy and paste and use a calendar picker, they can use PARiM to schedule almost instantly.

However, PARiM also offers powerful automation tools for more advanced use cases such as our shift patterns functionality. That means setting up bespoke rules for individual staff members that are automatically applied for each defined period. Imagine a nurse who has to visit certain locations or wards every 7, 9, 13 days or every other week or every third day due to specific needs of patients. That is actually far simpler than it sounds:

Use a Database of Unlimited Amount of Staff

One other nuance that makes scheduling with PARiM particularly relevant to the healthcare sector is the ability to filter your workforce by qualifications, sort by proximity to a certain work location or by any of the more than thirty options. 

Our filtering and sorting engine has been built upon cutting-edge technology that allows for searching amongst tens of thousands of staff members in seconds. Think of a Ferrari compared to a Fiat. The difference is that dramatic. For example, this is how you can sort staff by proximity:

This ability combined with our cost-effective pricing model that allows for unlimited users (staff and administrators alike) for free (you only pay for shift hours your staff actually works, the more your staff works the less per hour you pay) makes the solution attractive for organisations in the healthcare sector running on tight budgets that have a small amount of administrators assigning shifts to a lot of users 

Manage Pay Rates and Absences and Much More

The scheduling solution is completely integrated with customisable pay rates system and an additional absences management module giving you the required understanding of costs, financial data exports via CSV to your accounting software and clear view of which staff members are available for what costs when scheduling.

Discover what we can do for you, probably at a fraction of the cost and a smaller learning curve, by booking a free demo.