Case studies

Background

St George's Hospital in Tooting is one of the biggest NHS hospitals in the country. The trust also runs services at the Bolingbroke Hospital in Battersea and the Wolfson Rehabilitation Centre in Wimbledon. The trust has over 360 consultants.

The Challenge

Since the introduction of the new consultant’s contract in 2003 the trust had not seen much benefit from the new contract and the job planning process. Previous attempts at job planning had not been systematic across the trust, and it had been difficult to get an overview of the services being delivered.

Consultant Job Planning Project Officer, Francesca Abozzi, said “Job planning in previous years had been very mixed. Some of the specialties were very good at job planning, others less so. However all the job plans were in different formats and it was very inconsistent. If general managers wanted to collate the information together to get one overall picture, they had great difficulty tying all the different formats together”. In October 2006, the trust undertook an independent review of possible job planning solutions. They chose Zircadian’s web based solution MyJobPlan.

The Solution

MyJobPlan is a web-based solution that allows a trust to set up a job planning round centrally and then manage the process electronically. The format of the job plans can be set by the trust and the project manager can see centrally how the consultants are progressing. Francesca Abozzi said, “We chose MyJobPlan for a number of reasons. The main one was that it would bring a consistency and detail to job planning that we had not had before. All the job plans are consistent in language and stored centrally in one place. For consultants the process is now equitable. It is clear if there are unfilled PAs in a consultant’s job plan, or if they need more SPA’s to support their clinical work.”

The Benefits

Within six months the trust had a complete set of electronic job plans stored in a centralised database. The trust can now quickly review the PA data and clinical activities when they need to. This data will be vital in helping the trust plan its future healthcare services and operate within financial balance.

Francesca Abozzi said, “The benefit of using MyJobPlan is that it is a fast, easy and user-friendly program. You can store your previous year’s job plan, you can copy your previous year to your current job plan and re-submit it. You can easily sign job plans off, etc. Reports about categories and activities are very useful for analyses at different levels. Progress reports are fast ways to look at consultants’ stages and to send reminder emails.

Some consultants and Clinical Managers have already realised the benefit of using the program and I am sure at the end of the process there will be more with the same opinion. This year 100% of consultants submitted their job plan in our trust; this is a success although it took us a while to reach that percentage. We could not have done it without Zircadian’s Support. They are always there to help and this is essential for us.”