Compliance and beyond: how South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust transformed AHP workforce capacity through strategic job planning
Book a demooverall compliance rate
of admin time saved per year
staff actively using the system after one year
Overview
South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which alongside North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust forms University Hospitals Tees, faced a challenge common to many NHS organisations: managing a large, highly diverse Allied Health Professional (AHP) workforce without consistent, digitised visibility into operational capacity. Historically, AHPs have lacked the clear "safe staffing" mandates established for nursing workforces, making transparency around clinical and administrative time critical.
A lean core team at South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust launched a phased implementation of Patchwork's Job Planning system (formerly L2P). By December 2023, after a rapid mobilisation project, the Trust achieved 100% go-live compliance for the initial cohort of 120 therapeutic radiographers and cardio specialist nurses. Following this, a total of 1630 AHP workers have since embraced the system, helping the Trust to fundamentally redefine job planning, from structurally removing hidden administrative burdens, to uncovering untapped capacity and reducing historical waiting lists through group-working insights.
Hear our story told by Alison Kerr, AHP Workforce Strategic Lead at South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
The challenge
Before implementing Patchwork's system, the job planning landscape for South Tees' AHPs was highly decentralised. Across the different professions - including radiographers, physiotherapists, podiatrists, orthoptists, occupational therapists, dietitians and speech and language therapists - the approach to tracking time was a "mixed bag."
System fragmentation
Localised services relied on disparate offline tools, ranging from individual Excel spreadsheets to manually filled paper job plans. Some clinical departments had no structural concept of job planning at all.
Lack of AHP visibility
Unlike medical and nursing staff groups, AHPs lack standardised national safe staffing metrics. Without a single, unified source of digital reporting truth, leaders lacked clear data to advocate for resource deployment, highlight systemic gaps, or effectively balance capacity against rising referral rates.
The solution: an agile, purposeful deployment
To conquer an implementation of this scale, the Trust avoided an immediate, heavy "all-at-once" rollout. Instead, a core project team - consisting of an AHP Workforce Lead, a Nursing Workforce Lead, and a dedicated Patchwork (L2P) System Administrator - devised a rapid, high-intensity phased blueprint.
Phase 1: the focused clinical pilot
The core team selected a highly eager, tightly defined cohort of 120 staff members to validate the platform: 80 therapeutic radiographers (leveraging the specialised clinical background of the project lead) and a select group of cardio specialist nurses.
The choice of the radiotherapy team was strategic: the department was managing a high-stakes cancer waiting list amid climbing referrals. The pilot was completed within a two-month timeframe, with a rapid deployment of localised workshops, automated tracking, webinars, and tailored 1-to-1 administrative support sessions. Within weeks, service managers were completely onboarded, and the pilot group achieved full job plan sign-off.
Phase 2: Trust-wide mobilisation
Harnessing momentum from the initial pilot and a healthy dose of "friendly competition" between clinical departments, the Trust rolled out the platform to the remaining AHP workforce, bringing the total number of staff using the system to 1630. Despite the rollout taking place during a compressed three-month window directly over the challenging NHS winter season, the team successfully secured full system sign-off across all cohorts by December 2023.
Value and impact
Unlocking true organisational capacity
For the first time, the Trust's clinical leads and heads of professions possess an evidence-based view of actual workforce availability. Leaders use Patchwork as an analytical radar to locate staffing vacancies, identify systemic service gaps, and pinpoint exactly which clinical departments possess the capacity to safely expand patient services.
Restructuring the Paediatric OT Service
The implementation catalysed an immediate operational breakthrough within the Paediatric Occupational Therapy (OT) department. By using Patchwork to visualise clinical and operational time, the service systematically collapsed historical bottlenecks, optimised their delivery model, and achieved measurable outcomes.
Reduction in patient waiting times over a single year
Of previously lost capacity recaptured annually
Staff deployed to lead structured groupwork, freeing clinicians to focus on assessment
Increase in group therapy capacity per year from the new skill mix
Alongside hard efficiency gains, frontline staff reported a tangible increase in day-to-day job satisfaction.
Mitigating TOIL and manager burnout
Prior to implementing the platform, senior clinical managers were routinely accumulating unsustainable overtime to keep services afloat. Increased visibility of working over hours has helped to reduce this.
Identified as an initial backlog after averaging 10 hours per week over contracted hours
Structural TOIL reduced to, through a gradual, safe reduction of over-hours
In a wider team backlog of over 500 hours of outstanding TOIL
Shifting to a culture of empowerment
The intuitive, user-friendly nature of the Patchwork platform enabled clinicians to visually quantify their contributions to patient services. This transparency has given individual clinicians the confidence to request and protect dedicated blocks of time for specialised clinical research, career development, and multi-disciplinary project work.
Learnings for NHS organisations
A truly educational case study requires sharing the hurdles encountered and resolved during implementation. For South Tees, the primary "Year 1" learning curve centred on data consistency.
Standardising terminology
In the initial rollout, individual departments were given the flexibility to define their own activity categories. While this drove local engagement, it created "dirty data" at an organisational level, making it difficult to compare capacity across professions. The Trust has since implemented a standardised activity library to ensure clean, comparable Trust-wide reporting.
Sustaining momentum
Maintaining a 90+% compliance rate requires ongoing focus. The Trust continues to run refresher sessions and uses automated reporting to keep job plans current as services change.
Could job planning unlock the same capacity in your organisation?
Tell us how your teams plan their time today and we'll walk you through what a deployment looks like inside your trust.