Compliance and beyond: How South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust transformed AHP workforce capacity through strategic job planning

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.

1. 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.

2. 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 the following measurable outcomes:

• The department reduced patient waiting times by 78% over a single year.
• Administrative workload was reduced by 360 hours per year, and professional travel time dropped by 180 hours - recapturing a total of 540 hours of previously lost capacity annually.
• Managers used real-time data visibility to align staff to the top of their licenses. Highly qualified clinicians now focus purely on assessing children and setting treatment plans, while skilled Band 4 staff are deployed to lead structured groupwork and treatment interventions.
• Driven by this efficient new skill mix, group therapy capacity increased by 250 hours per year, allowing the service to treat a significantly higher volume of children.
• Alongside hard efficiency gains, frontline staff reported a tangible increase in day-to-day job satisfaction.

3. Mitigating TOIL and manager burnout

Prior to implementing the platform, senior clinical managers were routinely accumulating unsustainable overtime to keep services afloat. Since implementing the system, increased visibility of working over hours has helped to:

• Identify that senior clinical managers were averaging 10 hours per week over their contracted hours, accumulating an initial backlog of over 120 hours of TOIL (Time Off in Lieu) to be taken.
• Deliver a thorough analysis to challenge historical ways of working, enabling a gradual, safe reduction of ongoing over-hours to just 6 hours of structural TOIL.
• Unmask a backlog across the wider team of over 500 hours of outstanding TOIL. Using the platform’s mapping capabilities, the Trust systematically reduced this total TOIL by more than 50%, completely safeguarding the well-being of the workforce without impacting service delivery.

4. 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 clarity empowered frontline staff to say, “Look at everything my role actually delivers.” 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.