Integrated job planning & rostering: boosting NHS workforce visibility

Managing an NHS workforce effectively means balancing job planning requirements with real-world rostering demand, but these two systems often don’t talk to each other. Unifying these two processes gives organisations a clearer picture of how planned activity compares to actual work delivered, helping teams make informed decisions about staffing resources. In 2025, it is apparent that this is not a luxury but a necessity across the NHS.

The full NHS staffing picture

Reporting tools that surface job plan and rostering data provide an easy way to compare contracted hours with actual shifts worked. On Patchwork Insights, the Job Plan vs. Rostered Activities Dashboard is available for clinical staff, and shows consolidated data including activity types and weekly working hours.

Having this side-by-side view of job planning and rostering data means workforce managers can quickly spot if a clinician is working additional hours outside of their job plan, enabling teams to prioritise wellbeing and redeploy workers appropriately. 

Making proactive workforce decisions

By clearly showing planned vs. delivered work, managers can make better, more informed decisions:

• If a clinician is below their planned hours, managers can deploy the worker to vacant shifts instead of bringing in temporary staff, reducing additional bank or agency spend.
• If a clinician is over their contracted hours, this flags a well-being concern, allowing managers to step in before burnout becomes an issue.

Learning from others: benchmarking job planning

 Our job planning activity comparison tool takes this a step further by allowing trusts to benchmark job plans across organisations. Users can analyse the effectiveness of current job plans using the following capabilities:

• Filter by specialty to see how time is allocated in similar roles
• Compare job plan allocations across different trusts and private practice
• Monitor variations in time spent on different activities across specialities
• Use real-world data to make job plans fairer for clinicians 

With access to cross-organisational data, teams can easily benchmark job planning activity to drive improvements in demand and capacity planning using real-world insights.

Healthcare teams working smarter

Having real-time data on job planning and rostering can significantly improve workforce management and outcomes. Knowing where resources are being stretched too thin – or where shifts could be better aligned with job plans – helps trusts make better decisions for both their teams and their budgets.