News

The Welsh Assembly Government has renewed its investment in Zircadian’s junior doctors’ software for a further three years.

 

The solutions help the Assembly and region’s health boards manage the working hours of over 3,000 junior doctors’ posts and ensure doctors comply with the New Deal and European Working Time Directive (EWTD), thereby safeguarding both patients and the doctors themselves.

Zircadian’s junior doctors’ software is used across the seven health boards and two trusts in Wales. The Welsh Assembly initially selected the solutions ten years ago following the introduction of the New Deal. This governs junior doctor pay and requires health boards to manage doctors’ working hours, ensuring adequate rest periods during and between shifts, and limits the maximum number of hours worked per week.

 

The solutions also cover the Working Time Regulations for doctors in training, health and safety legislation introduced in 2004 which imposes different hours limits and rest requirements on junior doctors. The Welsh Assembly states that, over the last two years alone, more efficient rotas have contributed to savings of over £4m.

According to Ian Owen, at the Welsh Assembly Government, “Part of the Assembly’s role is to ensure that we manage the hours that our junior doctors work across our health boards, to comply with the New Deal and European Working Time Directive and to ensure doctors’ health and safety.”

"The rules for compliance for doctors’ hours are very complex, so it is excellent that deploying Zircadian’s solutions across the boards enables us to capture and report on the data with a consistent approach. We can produce reports for each region that then feed into one report for the whole of Wales. It has significantly reduced administration, yet still enables us to measure our compliance accurately. The efficiency gains have contributed to significant savings - over the last two years the average cost of junior doctor posts in Wales has dropped from £52,000 to £50,000, representing a figure of over £4m across the boards.”

Zircadian’s web solutions are used by over sixty medical staff and 3,000 junior doctors across Wales. The solution enables the health boards to report on New Deal and EWTD calculations, identify resources and hours available for service and training, and provide a detailed breakdown of potential New Deal and EWTD breaches. The Government uses the data to monitor compliance,submit ministerial returns and compare healthboards across the region.

Cathy Mansell, Project Manager at the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board uses MRM-Live to manage rotas for over 300 doctors. “Since using MRM-Live it is much easier to produce rotas that fully comply with EWTD and feed this back to the health boards. Our specialist departments can assess the optimum options and scenarios that work for them, to get the best possible rotas. It gives them the flexibility that manual rotas simply can’t, and can help them avoid the additional costs of employing locums.”

 

Masood Ahmed, Director at Zircadian stated, “Each health board is under mounting pressure to deliver services at the front line, manage costs and ensure the health and safety of its patients and employees. The administrative burden of managing complex rotas, while complying with European regulatory standards, can be reduced using rota management and monitoring systems like those supplied by Zircadian.”

 

For further information contact Dee Enright on 020 8946 8199 or email info@zircadian.com