Personalised Pay was a key selling point of the system for us and it didn’t exist in the previous systems that we used, or the ones that were available.
About Dorset HealthCare University NHS Foundation Trust
Dorset HealthCare is the biggest provider of healthcare services in Dorset and is responsible for all mental health and many physical health services. With a team of around 7,000 staff covering a wide range of expertise and specialties, the Trust delivers hospital and community-based care serving a population of nearly 800,000 people across over 300 sites.
Download Dorset Healthcare Case Study (7.25 MB)
Introduction
In the UK, an NHS doctor’s workload is rarely the same each month. Doctors are required to work different shifts week by week to meet the needs of patients, while also balancing the demands of a busy hospital. Inevitably, this makes accurately calculating attendance and absence an almost impossible task for workforce management teams and coordinators. Traditionally, doctors’ pay is calculated based on average pay calculations derived from rolling rota patterns, meaning doctors can work significantly different hours, yet be paid the same salary.
Nationally, junior doctors (sometimes referred to as ‘doctors in training’) and the British Medical Association (BMA), have long advocated for a compensation system that accurately reflects individual rosters and work schedules in the form of ‘individualised pay’ . However, the absence of a viable, cost-efficient solution has left NHS organisations grappling with time- consuming, labour-intensive processes that are often prone to error.
However, Dorset HealthCare has become one of the first NHS organisations in the country to adopt HealthRota’s groundbreaking Personalised Pay feature, helping the Trust to more accurately compensate doctors for the work they have done, while eliminating the administrative burden of manually calculating pay by rota coordinators and admin teams.
Challenges
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Complex Rosters and Manual Processes
Conventional medical rotas and rostering systems are notoriously complex, often resulting in inaccuracies when calculating doctors’ work hours and shift types. These issues, collectively, can result in doctors receiving inaccurate remuneration at month-end, leading to dissatisfaction and frustration among medical professionals.
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Inadequate E-Rostering Software
Many existing e-rostering solutions lack the functionality to support the complexities of modern medical rotas and are inflexible when it comes to integration with other applications. This limitation hampers innovation, efficiency and the ability to fairly compensate doctors for the hours they have worked.
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Compliance with Regulations
Balancing contractual rules and regulations, such as the European Working Time Directive (EWTD) and the Working Time Regulations (WTR) in the UK, poses a significant challenge for rota coordinators. The absence of an automated system makes it challenging to monitor the regulations and ensure compliance for a sizable team of junior doctors.
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Rotation of Placements
Junior doctors often rotate placements, moving to different departments and hospitals. This reshuffling of clinical teams adds a further layer of complexity to accurately managing pay, while impacting a rota coordinator’s ability to flexibility manage a junior doctors’ schedule according to the demands of the organisation.
Solution
HealthRota’s flagship Personalised Pay feature is the first digitised and automated e-rostering solution in the UK health and care industry that is capable of calculating payments for doctors with precision. This offered Dorset Healthcare an efficient way to track individual work schedules and rotations in real-time, without the need for manual recalculations by administrative staff.
This innovative approach to e-rostering not only ensured accurate pay for junior doctors, but has also saved time and reduced the administrative burden for the workforce coordinators.
The HealthRota app is very user friendly. By making rotas visible across specialties, it allows easy communication between teams and safe allocation of staff.
ST5 (Acute Medicine)
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Mobile App for Accessibility
HealthRota’s mobile app allows doctors to access and review their digital rotas in real-time, request leave, and check their remaining leave availability from the palm of their hand.
Crucially, the app also features an ‘exception reporting’ function, enabling doctors to simply and immediately report inaccuracies or additional hours. This provides full rota transparency and ensures that doctors are correctly compensated for all hours worked, including unplanned additional hours.
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Real-time Tracking and Reduced Administrative Tasks
Many existing e-rostering solutions lack the functionality to support the complexities of modern medical rotas and are inflexible when it comes to integration with other applications. This limitation hampers innovation, efficiency and the ability to fairly compensate doctors for the hours they have worked.
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Environmental Benefits
Dorset Healthcare has reduced the need for physical printouts of rotas every time a shift change has occurred, contributing to environmental sustainability by reducing paper and ink consumption.
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Transparency and Improved Working Conditions
Doctors gained visibility into their work schedules, hours worked, and pay calculations in real-time. This transparency has improved working conditions and reduced frustration among junior doctors. One noted, “It makes pay so much more transparent because junior doctors can see very clearly how they are paid.”
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Streamlined Administrative Processes
HealthRota consolidates critical tasks that were previously manual and prone to errors. The software automates compliance checks with EWTD regulations while producing individual pay schedules for each doctor.
Exception reporting and subsequent authorisations has eliminated lengthy pay queries and streamlined fast and accurate pay.
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Responsive and Adaptable Platform
The seamless onboarding of new doctors is yet another testament to the user-friendly design of the HealthRota software. Each new doctor receives a welcome email, details of their login credentials and comprehensive training resources are readily available for those who need them.
During the recent cohort of junior doctors who started their rotations in August 2023, not a single query was raised among this group, underscoring the intuitive nature of the application
Results
Since its deployment in Dorset HealthCare, initial results have been extremely positive, particularly in terms of the accuracy of junior doctors’ compensation. It has empowered doctors to effortlessly and effectively track their work schedules, ensuring clarity and reliability in their pay.
Michelle underscores the significance of Personalised Pay as a key feature for managing doctors rostering. She said, “Personalised Pay was a key selling point of the system for us and it didn’t exist in the previous systems that we used, or the ones that were available. It was key for us to produce the work schedules in the way that it does and because we’ve passed that stage now, we can say that it’s really exceeded our expectations.”
Annualised rotas and self-rostering/self-preferencing has created an equal distribution of shifts, reducing levels of burnout and ensuring that doctors only work the hours that they are paid for.
Benefits
- Greater certainty about fair and precise remuneration among staff
- Full rota transparency fostering an improved work environment
- Added convenience through mobile
- Accessibility
- Real-time updates on rota changes
- Substantial reduction in manual intervention resulting in time and resource savings
- Financial savings through precise shift calculations, eliminating averages
- Streamlined processes leading to fewer emails for rota checks and pay queries
- Mitigated risk of missing crucial information
Conclusion
The adoption of HealthRota’s flagship Personalised Pay feature has ushered in a new era of efficiency and pay transparency for medical teams at Dorset HealthCare. Personalised Pay has shifted the paradigm by accurately aligning pay with the exact number of hours and shifts worked, in contrast to traditional approaches that often fail to capture the true diversity of shifts carried out by doctors.
Along with HealthRota’s innovative e-Rostering and Workforce Management solution, this represents a significant leap forward for NHS organisations in their quest for efficient rota management systems balanced with equitable compensation for doctors, creating a win- win scenario for both medical staff and administrative teams.
Feedback from users
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