East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust (3)

East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust revolutionises its monitoring process using the MRM-Live E-monitoring module

Background

It is widely accepted, including by the BMA, that tired doctors often cannot work to their full potential. Studies have shown that the effects of sleep deprivation are similar to the effects of alcohol consumption on driving performance.

 

The New Deal and the European Working Time Directive (EWTD) are regulations that have been introduced to reduce the working hours of junior doctors to sensible levels, so that a safe, high quality service can be provided for patients. Trusts now have a contractual responsibility to regularly monitor the hours worked by junior doctors to ensure compliance with these rules.

 

The Challenge

The trust employs 453 junior doctors on 41 different rotas. Originally, over a two week period each doctor had to have 14 individual paper diary cards handmade for them by a member of the medical staffing team. So, for example, for one ten-person rota the trust would have to physically create 140 diary cards.

 

These would then need to be delivered to each doctor being monitored. This could take between one and two weeks as medical staffing employees had to physically go to the wards and deliver the paper forms to doctors, which was difficult when some doctors were on nights / annual leave etc.

 

The diary cards were not user-friendly, took a long time to fill in, and tended to come back damaged and illegible. As requests for sending back the forms were mostly ignored, the forms had to be physically collected with someone bleeping each individual doctor and meeting them to get the diary card, causing the diversion of clinicians’ valuable time to what was essentially a protracted administrative task.

 

The retrieval and return rates of the cards was poor. Then, when forms had finally been received, the data had to be transferred manually into a computer system with a medical staffing employee painstakingly analysing each doctor’s results.

 

The Solution

East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust has now revolutionised its annual monitoring process and demonstrated its strong commitment to the principles of the New Deal and EWTD by using Zircadian’s E-monitoring system. The Zircadian system is an electronic rota monitoring method that eradicates the need for paper diary cards and the long-winded process of creating, distributing, gathering and collating them.

 

The Benefits

Because the paper diary card process was so time-consuming, just one department could be monitored per month. By using Zircadian’s electronic system, the trust now completes the process across all departments in the same time.

 

Whereas there was originally one member of staff whose post was devoted solely to monitoring, this person’s human resources can now be more intelligently deployed elsewhere in the trust.

 

The new system has not only improved the working lives of the medical staffing team – the trust’s doctors are also happier with the online diary cards as they streamline the complex monitoring process, and enable their time and attention to be concentrated where it matters most.

 

Further information on the E-monitoring Module