Patchwork Health 2024: Wrapped

And, just like that, another year has flown by. As has become custom, I wanted to reflect on, and celebrate, everything that the last twelve months have brought. Whilst every year feels memorable in the world of scale-ups, this year was particularly significant for Patchwork Health. We welcomed some incredible new NHS partners, turned a huge variety of product dreams into reality, and completed our first acquisition. Ahead of a well-deserved winter break for our team, here’s a round-up of some things we’re proud of from 2024. 

Welcoming new NHS partners

Over the course of this year, our community of valued NHS customers has grown considerably. Over 60 NHS organisations across the UK are now leveraging Patchwork Health technology for their workforce needs. 

This includes Barts Health NHS Trust, Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust who we were delighted to welcome to join us in 2024. Working alongside these fantastic teams is a privilege, and we look forward to supporting them and all of our new partners as they implement innovative new workforce strategies in the months and years ahead.

This growth means that our solutions now support more than 55,000 healthcare workers and have saved the NHS over £120 million to date. In the past two years alone, more than 12 million shift hours were filled thanks to our technology.

Innovating to build a sustainable, flexible future for the NHS

To support this growing community of users and customers, our team has worked hard to deliver a host of updates and new features that have redefined flexibility and efficiency for both clinicians and managers.

Patchwork Rota has expanded functionality and features that place flexibility and fairness at the forefront of our offering:

• Our new shift swap feature empowers clinicians to propose rota changes and manage their schedules with ease, and managers can easily approve requested swaps without an additional admin burden. This is all possible while still maintaining safe staffing levels.
• We’ve introduced integrated service plans to ensure rotas align with true patient demand, minimising discrepancies in planned versus actual spend.
• To unlock the true potential of self-rostering, we’ve introduced a preference-based approach – combining clinician preferences with cutting-edge algorithms to assign shifts in a way that’s equitable, transparent, and efficient.

Patchwork Bank continued its evolution with:

• A platform makeover, making it faster and more intuitive for managers and temporary staffing teams.
• Enhanced block booking capabilities, including on-call shift scheduling, retrospective edits, and lightning-fast loading speeds.
• Wagestream integration – offering clinicians access to the benefits of Wagestream, all within our app. This provides real-time visibility of earnings and financial well-being support, as well as the ability to choose when to get paid and access a range of unique discounts. 

With Patchwork Agency Manager, we removed even more of the admin burden for healthcare teams:

• We’ve enhanced our direct engagement capabilities – making us the only single-tech solution in the market to offer fully integrated direct engagement contracting.
• Our new auto-cascade features allow organisations to automatically assign shifts through agency tiers based on configurable rules, saving time while improving compliance and control.

We’ve also continued to develop our Insights tools – harnessing machine learning to lay the foundations for even smarter analytics and data-driven workforce management in the years to come.

Collaboration & celebration

Last month, we had the huge pleasure of announcing our acquisition of L2P Enterprise Ltd. L2P is the country’s foremost provider of medical appraisal software and the fastest-growing provider of job planning software to healthcare professionals, with over 75 NHS Trusts using their solutions. This new partnership will allow us to offer a truly end-to-end suite of tools to meet clinical workforce needs – from capacity and demand planning to workforce deployment, reporting and appraisals. Our combined reach means we are now supporting over 100,000 clinicians across more than 200 healthcare organisations. 

2024 also marked a major milestone for the NHS Collaborative Bank – MWL in the North West – a Patchwork Health powered initiative led by Mersey and West Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. The collaborative bank, which is the largest in the UK, celebrated its four-year anniversary in November. So far, the initiative has filled more than 490,000 shift hours, saving £3 million in agency spend and retaining £32.7 million worth of staffing costs within the NHS. 

Another standout moment from this year was winning the Workforce and Wellbeing Initiative of the Year award at the HSJ Partnership Awards, recognising our efforts to unlock flexible working for clinicians across more than 60 NHS organisations. Last week, we were also announced as finalists alongside Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust in next year’s HSJ awards, for our work retaining and recruiting the Trust’s medical workforce via our end-to-end staffing solution.

The people who make it possible

It goes without saying that none of this would have been achievable without the dedication, energy, and creativity of the Patchwork Health team. Your hard work inspires me every day – from pushing the boundaries of innovation to organising incredible initiatives like the annual cycling trip, which saw us raise over £3,000 for the Motor Neurone Disease Association. I feel immensely proud and grateful to call you my colleagues. 

I also want to extend our thanks and gratitude to our incredible colleagues working within the NHS. Under relentless pressure and facing a constant stream of new challenges, your dedication to providing outstanding, compassionate care to patients provides all the motivation we need to continue creating new, innovative solutions to support you. Together, we will build a flexible, sustainable healthcare workforce – fit to face the challenges that lie ahead. 

Looking ahead

As we step into 2025, I’m filled with pride for what we’ve accomplished so far and with excitement for what’s still to come. The road ahead for the NHS has arguably never been more challenging, but that only fuels our motivation to make a difference. With our acquisition of L2P, our growing cohort of NHS champions, an ambitious product roadmap, and the most talented team in healthtech, I can’t wait to see what we achieve together next year at this most critical juncture for the country’s healthcare system.

View Patchwork Health’s 2024 wrap-up video here